iShop You Shop: Raising Questions About Reading Commodities

CLICK, I just bought a CD-ROM to train my ear to isolate vowel sounds.

CLICK, last year's version of the state reading exam will appear at your classroom door before ten o'clock tomorrow morning.

CLICK, the teacher down the hall just solved his problem with that vapid hall display for his tree unit.

Shopping has become so quick and easy that we now have little time to think about what we buy and why we buy it. Whether it's phonics programs, test prep kits, or bulletin board borders, everywhere we turn someone is trying to sell us something that will improve our teaching. Like the rest of our lives, literacy education has never been so commercial. And it takes the wit and wisdom of someone like Patrick Shannon to put this buy-it-all, buy-it-now hype into some perspective.

Part storybook, part consumer manual, part manifesto, iSHOP You Shop is a guide to becoming a savvy shopper, explaining how we can spot a lemon and addressing why we desire to buy reading commodities in the first place. Using shopping as a metaphor for asking questions about things and buying as a metaphor for making decisions about our lives, Shannon probes the commerce of literacy that seems to paraphrase Descartes' maxim: I shop, therefore, I am.

iSHOP is a quick read that will stay with you for a very long time.