Readicide

                Readicide is the second book I’ve read by Kelly Gallagher and I always look forward to what he has to say about education and the various activities he presents. Several of the ideas in Gallagher’s book really stood out to me. The first is the differences he shows between multiple choice questions and short answer responses. Although both can allow the student to get a similar response, students use and develop critical thinking skills when answering the short response question. Multiple choice only asks students to recall information, not using more complex skills.

                One part of the text I found interesting was seeing the correlation between time spent reading and performance on standardized tests. The more time students spend reading each day, the higher they score on standardized tests. Even reading recreationally will help students develop the skills they need to succeed. Students should be given more reading time and access to books in the classroom, as they may not get this at home. If my future school doesn’t offer SSR time, I will do my best to give students the reading time that they need. Not only will this help increase their test scores, it will help instill in them a love of reading that they will hopefully carry through the rest of their life.

                Gallagher mentions that many schools are doing away with novels in order to teach smaller texts and focus more on test preparation. To me, this is an injustice to the students. I don’t feel that standardized tests are the best way to assess a student’s knowledge as there are several varying factors. Schools push tests and test preparation so much because it seen as the way to judge the schools success. To be seen as a more “successful” school, many are doing whatever they can to help students pass the test, even if that means they don’t learn anything along the way. To sacrifice reading time in order to prepare for tests is something that benefits the school and not the student, which should be the primary focus of any learning institution.

I Read It, But I Don't Get It

“Readers of tomorrow must do more than memorize words. They must be prepared to analyze, validate, and ask the next logical question. They have to know how to think.” Though it was at the end of the book, this quote stuck with me. Many students today only “read” when they have to. The kind of reading they are used to doing on a daily basis is posts on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Although students are technically reading, they aren’t gaining or exercising any reading skills. Students need to be able to comprehend what they read, analyze it, and relate it to real life. Students won’t get this through reading tweets. This book had a lot of great ways to get students thinking about their reading and increasing their comprehension, as well as teaching them valuable reading skills.

Another concept of the book I liked is that you can’t just tell a student that they have to infer: you have to teach them how to make inferences. This could be an entirely new concept to many students, so telling them to make inferences is telling them to do something they don’t know how to do. It’s important to walk students through the process of making inferences the first few times, showing them how to scour the text to find the information they are looking for. They need to be taught how to connect the dots. This is a learned skill, not something teachers can simply tell students to do without any prior instruction.

I also like modeling for the students good reading skills. One thing Tovani did that I liked was continue to read even after students enter the classroom. This will show students how enjoyable reading can be, as the teacher doesn’t just put it down in the middle of a page. Students often model after their teachers, and reading would be a great thing to pick up. Also, it leaves me, as the teacher, more time to read.

A huge part of this book is opening students’ eyes to things that they didn’t know they know. Tovani asked students to do several things, and many students responded “I don’t get it.” However, after some prompting, the students ended up realizing that they know more about the concept than they thought they did. All students need some times is a little push to be able to understand the concept.

Social Justice

            Social justice, when referring to when it was first coined by Pius XI, refers to the “economic aspect of the common good . . . the use of property for the benefit of all men.” When working, wage-earners shouldn’t ask for higher wages then they need to survive. To support a system like this, economic institutions need to be put in place to regulate the distribution of wealth to stabilize an economy. This idea of “income equality” is one that would later be adopted by Karl Marx.

            From this definition, as well as other definitions and examples I have found of social justice, I see social justice as a form of communism. Wealth and property isn’t the exclusive right to the rich: every person has an equal right to all property, and all wage-earners have the same salary.  Money is a result of a working population, therefore the money should be equally spread among every worker.

            One issue with social justice is the institutions that distribute the wealth. In many cases, greed takes over, and the people in charge of distributing the wealth do so unfairly. The lower class gets oppressed by the ones who manage money and distribute goods, who take more than their fair share.

            A great way to teach social justice to students would be through a book many teachers already use: Animal Farm. In this novel, animals take over a farm and instill social justice: all the animals work their fair share and receive an equal share of rations. Until greed takes over. This would be a great way to teach students the things that go wrong when social justice is adopted by a society at large.

Montavon, P. A. (1957). Review: The Theory of Social Justice. The Review of Politics, Vol. 19(1). Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.ewu.edu/stable/1405045

Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom

            I once read somewhere that literature reflects history. I feel some points in this article reinforce this point. The article says that “Studying canonical texts is an important strategy for understanding the values and ideologies of dominant groups at various points in history . . . literary texts such as The Scarlet Letter and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn offered me insight into the American psyche than most texts on U. S. History.” History books may discuss more of what is going on in the world at a specific time, but it leaves out how different groups respond to these events/ideas on a personal and emotional level. Literature, although often fictional, gives a better idea of what people of the time felt and how they reacted to certain circumstances.

            Another part of the article I support is the idea multiculturalism is more than reading works written by people of color or about people of color. I feel it would be more beneficial to do a multicultural reading of a text that doesn’t necessarily primarily focus on the various cultures of its characters. Many texts that focus on other cultures often stretch stereotypes and can leave students with a negative image of the culture, something that has the opposite effect of that text. Doing a multicultural analysis of a different kind of text would be more beneficial, as it also asks students to apply their critical thinking skills as they analyze the text.

            One activity the article used that I might adopt for my own classroom is using rap songs in a poetry unit. This would be a great, fun way to increase levels of student interest and engagement in the unit. Letting students pick their own song to match with a piece of poetry would be helpful as students get to exercise their creativity as well as critical thinking and analyses skills. Students may have so much fun with the assignment that they may not even feel like they are doing school work.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

            Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed tells of two different educational styles: banking education and problem-posing education. Banking education seems to be an extremely ineffective style. In it, students are treated as lesser than the teacher and taught only the things they need to survive. They’re not taught to think critically: most of their “education” is just being able to recall facts that the teacher recites. This style of teaching only works one way: teacher to student. There is no room for the students to collaborate with the instructor. Students aren’t even given any reasoning as to why what they’re learning is important. They are given only enough to survive and be exploited by the oppressors.

            Problem-posing education, on the other hand, seems to be a much more effective approach. The communication channel is opened up both ways so that students can collaborate with their teacher or challenge claims. Students are taught to think critically. As communication is two-way, students are also the teachers, creating teacher-students and student-teachers in the classroom. When students are taught, they are also given meaning behind what they are learning and how it is relevant to their lives or why it is important to history. This seems like a better educational approach as students are able to expand their minds, think critically, and gives students a better understanding of reality.

            Although the United States shies away from the banking education style (from what I’m aware), many countries around the world may resort to it in an attempt to control the population. Oppressors “dumb down” the population by feeding them information that they approve, not allowing students to think critically. By doing so, the oppressors ensure that they can remain in power and exploit the misfortunes of the oppressed. If educational standards in these countries were shifted to a problem-posing educational style, world poverty rates may decrease as people are able to rise above their oppressors.

Assessing and Evaluating Students' Learning

                One thing that stood out to me in the “Secondary Standards-Based Grading and Reporting Handbook” handout was how much a zero grade can stand out. The student can be doing just fine in a class, miss an assignment, and then have their overall grade destroyed. This doesn’t give an accurate representation of what the student actually knows. While it would be helpful to the student’s grade and confidence, I think not including zero-grades should be implemented in a specific way: the student should be informed of the zero grade, and if it isn’t made up they will be told how it affects their overall grade. I had one class a few years ago where I had a few zero grades. They weren’t factored into my grade until the course was over. Suddenly my grade in the class dropped form an A- to a C. If I had known I had zero grades, I could have corrected this. Zero grades can be omitted from a gradebook, but the student should be informed so as not to have it affect their grade later.

                The other article, “Assessing and Evaluating Student’s Learning” discusses what types of assessment are beneficial to which types of teachers/students. Multiple choice tests focus more on recall and finding “right answer” while open-ended tests assess more understood concepts. In the classroom, I plan to use a mix of these. I will have a short part of a test be multiple choice comprehension tests, just to make sure that students have read the text and were paying attention to it. The bulk of the test will comprise of more discussion-based questions. Questions like these will “encourage students to formulate their won response, rather than recalling ‘correct answers.’” This will show how students understand a concept of the text and show that they can translate it and put it in their own words, demonstrating understanding.