Wilhelm, Chapter 6 - Expanding Concepts of Reading, Response, and Literature

I can feel Wilhelm's passionate distaste for standardized testing as if the pages of the book itself were red-hot. Although this is not the focus of the chapter, but a jumping off point, I feel it bears some discussion.

Too many teachers sadly shake their head when it comes to standardized testing, but do nothing about it. We need to change the way our country feels about this subject. We've let it go too far already. If we allow standardized testing to determine the funding we receive and to be used as a measure of our success as teachers, then we are agreeing that government officials far removed from education know better than we do how to assess our own students. We need to take this power out of outsiders' hands. This begins by doing our own classroom research. We need to show firsthand proof of the methods that work in our classroom and we need to demonstrate our students' growth and improvement.

A few words on literacy, then. Literacy is more than the ability to read words and make sense of them. Literacy is the ability to interact with text – to have a conversation with it. A good reader is transformed by a good book in some way. Wilhelm takes this idea one step further even and shows that literacy is an interaction with text and an application of that text to the world around us. A successful reader, then, is one who is transformed by a text and then transforms her world as a result. The world should look different after reading a good book; more importantly, it should be different.