Readicide

Out of everything the book covered, the one part that stuck out to me the most was the part captioned "The Danger of Word Poverty". This stuck out to me because I have done prior research on the achievement gap of vocabulary development between low SES students compared to high SES students. 

I am placed as a student teacher at Horizon Middle School in the Spokane Valley. The students primarily come from middle to upper class families and the school has a free and reduced percentage of 29.5% as of May 2013. I am an AVID tutor at Garry Middle School located in the outskirts of Hillyard. The free and reduced lunch rate at Garry is about 82%. 

I became interested in this topic because of Language Use and Structure taught by Tracey McHenry. We were covering language acquisition and how lower SES children are less exposed to a large range of words, where as children of high SES are exposed to more. Some figures show that there is a gap of some 382 to 187 words per hour. Readicide on page 32 states that "the average young middle-class child hears 32 million more spoken words than the young underprivileged child by age five". 

This is not to say that children who come from an underprivileged home can't excel in school but the statistics are working against their favor. 

The book gives many statistics about children and test scores which is interesting, but doesn't get me to where I want to be within my research. I conducted my own miniature research project by testing my eighth students at Horizon Middle School because there happened to be a transfer student from Garry in my class. I gave them a list of common words that an eighth grader should know and let them all study the list and definitions for 5 minutes, then gave them the simple quiz consisting of 20 questions with a variety of matching, fill in the blank, and multiple choice. Student A (from Horizon) received a score of 23/25 and the transfer student from Garry, student B, received a score of 9/25. 

This could have been an unfair or not a credible way of testing the theory, but still the results are pretty shocking. 

The section talks about standardized testing and how the underprivileged students are affected when it comes to taking these tests. Below I have attached a photo of the differences between the schools MSP scores for the 2012-13 school year. 

The results of the scores only proves what I believe and what Kelly Gallagher wrote about. 

I Read It, But I Don't Get It

One of the things I really notice in my placement classroom is the resistance to reading the students have. They are supposed to have an Accelerated Reader book from the school library at all times because they need a certain amount of points for the trimester. Even with books they can choose they have resistance to reading them. 

Another thing that I have noticed about the students is their reluctance to read informational texts. I'm not sure if it's because of the material that it covers or because they don't know how to read it.

One of the strategies my cooperating teacher uses that reminded me of the strategies in the book, is called "barfing". She has them read a piece of text and respond to it with their thoughts. They are to avoid to using the words "what" or "interesting". They should define any words that they don't understand and anything that they want to know more about they should underline or highlight. My cooperating teacher uses this to help them break down the text and understand what they are reading. Too often we read something and at the end we ask "what the heck did I just read?" I know that I do that often and have to re-read more once.

One thing I really liked was how the author brought up sharing our experiences with reading and our struggles and how we worked through them as a way to build a community with our classroom. I think that teachers are looked at as being perfect human beings that don't really struggle because we are teachers. It is important to let our students know that we struggle. It makes us more relatable and eases the tension that the student may not understand something right away. 

I also liked her strategies of making inferences with the text which is very Common Core based and her strategy of determining what is important within the text and synthesizing the information to create new thinking. I think these are strategies that we should employ in our classroom because of their relation to  Common Core.