When I was in school (grade school, middle school, high school) once the school year was over, the school year was over. History. Done. Finished. The previous year had no real connection to the next. Different classes, teachers, etc…
Every so often in movies, TV shows, comics, I see reference to summer reading lists.
The only reading lists I ever got were in Lit classes that had to be done during the actual school year, not in the summer.
When I was a kid the only ones who had to do any type of school work during the summer were the dumbbells who screwed up during the school year.
So how common is it for students to have to do this over the summer?
I had to do it in high school when I was taking honors English. Lower-level English classes didn’t have any summer reading.
I had to read: The Red Badge of Courage & The Old Man and the Sea (pre-freshman) Les Miserables & Siddhartha (pre-sophomore) The Scarlet Letter & I forgot the other one (pre-junior)
Didn’t have any senior year because the only honors course available was AP English and I refused to do the essays that you were supposed to write about the books over the summer. I read the damn things. All of them. Every. Damned. Page. That was more than half the class did.
No, I’m not still bitter that it took me three months to slog through all of Les Mis and then found out the rest of the class read the abridged version. What gave you that impression?
My kids had to do it because they were in Honors English or AP English. I think it gets them a jump on the “classics” they are to read to prepare them for the AP exams.
Summer reading for English classes has been around forever, especially for kids in advanced classes: a more recent trend is summer assignments in other AP classes: there are summer assignments for AP US History, AP Chem, AP Physics, AP Government. One reason is the (positive, IMO) trend of opening up AP courses to a wider variety of students, not just the ones whom you are sure will be successful. Because you have kids of a lower level in the class, you have to move more slowly, which means you have to get a leg up in the summer. Furthermore, there are certain sorts of enrichment activities you can assign over the summer that you can’t really assign over the school year: our AP US History kids have to visit three museums of American history or art and write a brief summary. They can do it in an afternoon in our downtown (and there is public transportation) or they can take advantage of museums in other places if they travel. AP Government kids have to do 10 hours of campaign work. Both those sorts of assignments give them something to talk about, some context to latch onto, when they get to class.
Another not insignificant reason for these assignments is to scare off kids who have no real ambition.
Other teachers assign these things simply because they think they are supposed to or because they want to look tough.
Personally, I give a summer reading assignment in my AP English class (a packet of essays–it’s a non-fiction/rhetoric class) so that we have some examples to discuss on day one. I do NOT give anything for my AP economics class because I have enough time as it is to cover anything and I couldn’t think of anything I consider meaningful, and I don’t assign empty things.
I had summer reading lists in high school. I was in honors and AP English classes.
My kids don’t get reading lists, but they do get a summer reading program. They have to keep track of how much they read, and there are prizes and a pizza party if you read enough to qualify.
Both my kids, one in high school and the other about to enter middle school, have summer reading lists, from which they have to choose at least one book to read. This is for all students; the kids entering AP English have two specific books to read. But this is Long Island, and we’re kind of nuts about our schools (one of the reasons we have incredibly high property taxes). All the kids will have an assignment soon after school starts to write about the book they read.
I got a summer reading list every year after ~5th grade. They would lecture us at the end of the year that we’d better read them or we were in deep, hot water when school got back in session, but when we came back in the fall they were never mentioned and I don’t know a single person that read any of it.
We didn’t have them where I grew up, not even for those of us in the advance English classes. However, the summer after high school I moved to southern Massachusetts to help care for an elderly relative. The city library had an entire display every summer of books for school kids’ reading lists. It seemed as though all middle and HS English tracks had them in that city. Like Cisco’s classmates, my brother didn’t read many of the required books, and never got in trouble for it that I know of.
I didn’t have a Sumer (or summer) reading list until I went to a pretty selective prep school, and then had one for each of my four years there. I love(d) to read anyway, so I didn’t mind in the least. We had to choose five books from a list of ten options each summer, IIRC, and I read a lot of stuff I might not otherwise have ever gotten around to: The Invisible Man, Black Like Me, To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye spring to mind.
We were on the honor system and were never asked about them once classes resumed. Only a fool or a lazyass wouldn’t do the reading, though.
I had summer reading lists that were quite extensive in high school - we weren’t expected to read them all, but we did have to pick a subset.
I still laugh because one of the books listed between my freshman and sophomore year was “Bang the Frum Slowly” (sic). Thanks to that typo, for years afterward my friends and I believed that was actually the title of a book. We had no idea idea what a frum was, but hey … maybe it was something the ancient Sumerians used.
What do you mean by a connection? It’s not as if the summer assignment is related to anything specifically taught the year before–the only real connection is that the teacher for the next year’s course goes around to the classes of the kids that will be in his/her class in the fall and hands out the assignment. I actually get a list of the kids enrolled and do my best to make sure they all sign off as having received the assignment. We also make announcements "If you are taking X next year . . . "
Certainly most of my kids know me/know about my class before they show up the first day, but it’s a smallish (1200-1500) school, and the honors kids are a smaller subset among them. Many of them come by and introduce themselves the spring before they start my class, and I’ve taught their siblings/boyfriends/girlfriends/teammates, so there’s a connection in the sense that we are all part of a continuous community, but not a curricular connection.
Absolutely nothing like that happened at any level of my education. We didn’t even know who our teachers were going to be or what exact classes we’d have until we got our schedule on registration day (late August, 1 week before the start of school)
Were you in a huge school? Didn’t siblings and older friends and general scuttlebutt prepare you?
Honestly, in and of itself this is an argument for summer assignments: I like that my kids walk in with some sense of what I am like and what to expect from the course.