Chapt 5

Gallager sums up the Readicide problem and brings up many practical solutions. He also explores the successful educational model used in Finland, the global educational leaders. Although Finnish schools do not have the level of cultural diversity or size of the US, their priority is on reading, comprehension, and reaching deeper cognitive processing, and not shallow coverage for standardized tests. Their focus on literacy is producing the best students in the world. Maybe we should be examining how the US can adapt this successful program into our failing educational system before our students and our nation slip from global competitor and superpower to a cautionary tail of internal social, and educational decay. I believe that shallow learning benefits no one. It hurts us on a international level by producing scores of graduates unable to compete in the increasingly high tech, and literate global economy. We are slipping, and will soon be surpassed if our schools continue to focus on shallow learning and ridiculous standardized testing routines. Penalizing schools for failing is also absurd. How counter productive can our government be when they withhold funding from schools who desperately need help with struggling students.  I hope Washington sees the light, and changes these policies- soon.

Chapt 4

Gallager talks about under teaching more difficult text in this chapter. I witnessed this more than anything other than the intensive testing focus in my classroom observations. This particular incidence concerned lessons on Greek and Roman history. The teacher told the kids to read the chapter and do worksheets sorting through complex vocabulary like Epicureanism, Hellenism, Socratic Method, and Hippocratic Oath on their own. I actually asked the teacher about the difficult and generally unfamiliar words, he said that he didn't actually teach these harder terms,  just exposed the class to them. I thought this was rather bizarre because these words were included on the chapter vocabulary lists the kids would eventually be tested on. They had to define and be able to explain such conceptual terminology without any support or background information. Personally I could see the frustration of the students, when pronunciation was an issue let alone comprehension.