Readicide Book Study: Chapter One. If there's an elephant in the room and everyone talks about it, is it still an elephant?

I'm hopping along with a fabulous group of fifth grade teachers doing a collaborative study of Readicide. It's fairly new and just getting traction (when my copy came in, my high schooler said, "Oh, my English teacher's reading that.") , so it seemed like a great book for bouncing around some ideas. At first, I thought that the author would really just be preaching to the choir, but then I thought about it, and I do know some teachers that would totally disagree with the book's basic premise.

I'm lucky. I work in a district that is very anti-drill and kill. We don't do AR because it promotes one-dimensional comprehension. We have bookrooms loaded with novels but don't have textbooks.I own enough book club sets that if my husband ever finds out how many (and how much I've spent over the years), well ....

Our math department's approach is similar.

Ours is an odd county. A four-lane highway (U.S. 74) run pretty close down the middle.  On the west side of it, where I live, is affluent suburbia. On the east side of it, where I teach, is still country, with large poultry farms, small family farms, and trailer parks populated, mainly, with new immigrants, along with pockets of new, expensive neighborhoods. While my school serves one of those pockets and some surrounding farmland, the schools on either side of us are Title I.

All that to say, our district serves a very diverse population. Our subgroups have subgroups, and even with that, our test scores are among the best in the state.

So why pick up a copy of Readicide?

One, I work in a building where we are allowed the freedom to be who we are and to teach like it. Believe it or not, there are teachers who choose to make their classrooms all about the test scores. What the (Insert your own expletive.)? 

Second, what the author describes as happening in low-income schools is absolutely true. I spent my young years teaching in inner-city schools (Seriously. One showed up in an episode of History Channel's Gangland series.) and this group of children, who live and breathe talk and wordplay, detest reading. If you saw the lesson plans handed down from that county's district people, you'd know why. Isolated skill after isolated skill, selection after selection. Don't think; just bubble, As a result, real reading is just for 'bookworms' or for 'actin' like (you're) white.' and while I'm not normally a conspiracy-theory thinker, a small part of me has always wondered if that isn't on purpose.

Finally, and quite related to the other two, our profession matters, and it's under attack. If we're going to be heard, we have to come correct, with actual facts and statistics. We can't fight a slick, insanely-well funded corporate and government partnership with "That's not nice." and "That's no fun." Nobody cares. There are profits to be made.

It's past time to talk about the elephant, and about the damage it's doing.

Anyone should be able to see that there is a big shift in what American business is all about. The era of manufacturing jobs has ended; there are very few 'We don't pay you to think. Shut up and push your button." jobs left. Why, then, would we educate people to compliance? If we're going to hold our own against the rising economies of Asia and South  America, we have to educate toward innovation and collaboration.  Will our current educational landscape support that? I'm thinking it won't.

So, if I haven't totally depressed you, there's one more stop on the hop! Jessica, The Whimsical Teacher, is next!

If, somehow, this is your first hop page, you'll want to begin at the beginning (in the words of Imogene Herdman). It all begins here, at the home of The Research-Based classroom!

Interested in joining in? Here's our schedule. We'd love to know what you think!