Gallagher’s “Readicide”

               The book Readicide by Kelly Gallagher promotes many excellent ways at which teachers can approach attempts to get students to actually like what they are reading. The section I found to be most valuable has to be the part where Gallagher introduces the Los Angeles Unified School District’s unit plan for the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The unit plan is shockingly comprehensive and long, teaching many different skills from just one novel. Students will spend months on this novel it seems like, and not being too far removed from the role of student myself, I know that by the end of the unit I would never want to pick up To Kill a Mockingbird ever again. I feel that in order to get students to actually enjoy reading and want to read novels on their own outside of the classroom we have to provide for them a variety of works that they can explore. Maybe going even so far as to only teach one important literacy skill or concept per novel that they read. Sure, it would mean having to find many more novels to use in the classroom, but at least the students would not be spending almost half of the school year reading out of the same book over and over again. Granted, there is no roundabout way to avoid having to meet common standards that are set for teachers to get students to achieve. Teachers still have to meet those standards one way or another and learning as many as you can out of one novel seems like the easiest and most cost efficient way to achieve those standards. However, I feel that is doing students a disservice to ease the burden on the teachers end. We need to not take the easy way out and actually motivate students to go out in to the world and read as much as they can by giving those opportunities to learn many different skills and concepts out of just as many pieces of literature.