Summer reading. We all go to McQuaid; we all know this phrase. [Side note: Did you know that many public schools don’t have summer reading? I didn’t.] To some of us, it is just an annoying project interrupting their blissful summer of relaxation. To others, it may instill fear of an impending test and/or essay on a book that they didn’t even touch over the summer. Still others may read the books on their own, but do poorly on the test because they did not know what to study. But no matter how they approach summer reading, there is one thing that all students have in common: they hate it.
First, some background on the origin of summer reading. Summer reading has existed for a surprisingly long time, with the first recorded programs occurring in the late 1800s. During this time period, people moved away from farms and into cities, leading to their children having more free time rather than working on their parents’ farm. Because of this, many summer reading groups were founded with the intent to give these kids something to do over the long summer months while their parents still went to work every day.
There were three goals in giving the children something to read during summer. Librarians wanted the school kids to have something to do, to try and retain some of the information from last year, and to hopefully develop good reading habits early on in life. All of these goals are good and admirable, especially for younger students, but it leaves the question of why high school students are still obligated to do it. High school students have hopefully already built up their good reading habits, but they will not be improved by simply assigning two books to read over the summer. How about, rather than giving high school students some books to read over the summer, high schools instead increased opportunities for them to take summer jobs? This would both give them something to do over the summer and give them good experience working at a real job for possibly the first time.
Okay, we now know how summer reading was founded, but why is it that everyone dislikes summer reading so much? One reason is the feeling of unfairness. On the very first day of school, you will be tested by a teacher that you do not know. It can be difficult to predict what the best way to prepare for their test is. This is a fair point, as different teachers at different levels center their tests around different topics and themes in their books. In addition, some teachers will have a test on just one book and others on both of them. Why should the student have to predict what will be on the test made by a teacher they may have never even met?
On the other hand, teachers want to make sure their students do something productive over the long summer break. Three months is a long time to go without thinking about school at all, so summer reading is a small project to work on over this time. The only problem is that most of the time, students put off reading until late into the summer or the beginning of the school year—assuming they read at all. This does not actually help any of them, and instead simply adds more stress to the back-to-school season. Many high school students are also taking APs, which pretty much all have summer assignments of reading or projects or chapters and questions from a textbook.
The real question we should be asking is why it is “summer reading” at all. Why not summer math problem sets, or summer textbook reading for history? [Ed. Note—Don’t give me ideas.] It would be much easier to tell whether you had completed math problems than to give a test based on a novel. The objectivity of this also comes at a cost: anything that is completed at home can, and will, be cheated on by students looking to do less work.
Despite this, they still would be at least thinking about school rather than hoping for the best on a test on the first day of class. Personally, I’m still waiting for my summer Duolingo homework.