Response to Readicide

First, I realize that I have not been posting in my blog during the dates I was supposed to. I apologize to my classmates and teacher for this.

     The initial reaction I had on Readicide was fear. I loved to read as a kid, and it was because I was able to choose the books I was interested in. I don't really remember much about the "reader level" system when I was a kid, but during elementary school I read all that was interesting to me, and tended to cut out what was not. I was home-schooled for middle and high school, so throughout my teens I was able to continue this trend. College was the first place where I received assigned readings for literature, and I was not as prepared for it. I had to eventually see the point in reading things that did not particularly interest me. The information contained in each piece of literature brings out thoughts and ideas from myself and my peers that are open for discussion. Despite my initial struggle, reading was not dead to me. I feel that this is because I have never had a "fact based" multiple choice test, or anything similar, for a piece of literature in my life. In college, the task has always been to read and discuss and write about the literature; facts were a support, but not the focus of the lesson.  I focused on the idea of reading from multiple sources. The analysis and comparison between different texts, be it literature or informational texts, helps students to look at what they read critically, which helps build understanding. It was the idea of creating "Topic Floods" on page 81 that made me think about this concept. This is the sort of thing that I have done in my college literature classes, so it seems ludicrous to me for a middle or high school to do otherwise.
     The common core lists skills that the students are supposed to be able to do at their grade level, so the best way to assess this would be to have them use these skills in some way. Also, a multiple choice test gives the teacher no information on where the student may be struggling, so it makes it near impossible to evaluate a student's true skill from such a test. Students should be assessed on whether or not they are able to compare, relate, and use, the information within each text. Simple writing tasks are not always enough, though they can act as a great standard assessment. Other assessments, such as self evaluation, are more useful for the teacher because it reveals what a student feels the he/she can or cannot do. It is time we treat or middle and high schoolers like we treat many college students; we need to revive reading.