Tiffany-Readicide+Ch.3+One+Pager

Tiffany Scullion // Readicide // by Kelly Gallagher Chapter 3 One-Pager

Reading the first two pages of this chapter made me immediately think of my own classroom. All reading required for the class (poems, novels, plays, articles, etc.) is done in class, but not usually in a manner that would allow a person to really get into a reading flow. I am always stopping the reading to discuss information we have just read about a character, reiterate what is currently happening in the text, ask questions regarding the reading, or pause to mention a word that I have designated as vocabulary for our current reading assignment. I hadn’t really thought about it too much prior to this chapter, but I am sure that I would be pretty annoyed if I was really starting to get into something I was reading and a person was constantly stopping me to talk about what I had just read. I guess I am always so concerned that the students may not understand what we are reading that I feel compelled to stop and make sure they know.

As a fairly new teacher, I have spent a lot of time looking for lesson plan ideas most specifically for novels that I would like to read in class. I really enjoy finding what some people have already done and modifying it to fit the needs of my class. What I always notice is all of the //stuff// teachers put into a unit. When Gallagher discussed the curriculum guide his school uses for //To Kill a Mockingbird// (p. 61), I was relieved to hear him say that it is simply too much. If I were to try to do every lesson from that unit for that particular novel, not only would it probably take my students all year but my students would probably stop showing up to my class all together. I only hope that I cover what seem to be the most important parts of the text without beating my students over the head so much that they begin to hate what we are reading.

Lastly, I have always wanted to have some sort of time during class where my students could read for pleasure but I have yet to really figure out how to do this. I know the feeling Gallagher describes – where you are so into what you are reading that it almost seems as if time stands still when in all actuality hours have passed. You find yourself being right there with the characters, watching what they are doing, and anxiously awaiting what will come next. I absolutely love reading! With that being said, I can also honestly say that I have not loved everything I have ever read. I have always hoped that my students would get that feeling with something that we read in class, but maybe they would be better off reading that on their own. Maybe I need to provide them the time to discover this feeling. My students do not have access to a lot of reading materials in their own home, but I do have a large library of novels, short stories, poems, and plays in my classroom. Over the course of the last two years, I have loaned some of the above to my students but I still feel that this plethora of reading enjoyment is totally underused. If anyone has SSR in their classroom I would love to hear about it.