Blog Post 6

I think Gallagher has very good points behind the causes of schools killing reading for kids. But the solution is tricky. You have to teach students the material necessary for the class but you want the students to actually soak up the information at the same time. So what do you do? I think the solution is reading more of the genre fiction books. For example in my senior English class we get to read one book that has to do with our research topic, which is most of the time genre fiction. The second book we read is The Kite Runner. For the people in my class that actually read the book they found that they really enjoyed it for the most part. This made the class so much more fun and exciting because we read a book that wasn’t painful to talk about. While we liked it, there was also got valuable lessons out of the novel as well. Since it is Multicultural English we of course looked at the usual symbolism, irony and other literary devices. But for this book we also got to talk about how we felt during certain scenes. We got to explore an emotional side of the book along with the controversies in the book. I have never read a school book like that before. This book kept the whole class interested and class time was more valuable I thought. We would still have to read some more literally books though because there are probably some things that you can’t get out of genre fiction books that you can get out of more literally books. But if schools showed students that there is more to books than just literary devices then maybe more students would read more outside of school.