When I was in school (graduated 1994), I only had them for my 12th grade AP Lit class. We read 4 books and kept a reading journal. Then we were tested and wrote essays when we came back the next year.
My 16 year old had them starting in 10th grade, because that was the year that she started taking Honors English/Social Studies. We have it for all of our Honors and AP English classes, and some of the Social Studies. Last year she only had to read the 3 books over the summer. After coming back to school she was tested and wrote essays. This year she has had one assignment with each of the 3 books. They were fairly small assignments… I know one was to find an article about Israel and write a summary or something like that. She also had to keep a vocab list from all three books.
Our high school is starting a new thing this year with the 9th grade. All the students had one summer reading book – The Examination. They had assignments with it, although I don’t remember what all it was. I’ll be teaching 9th grade this year, but I’m math so wasn’t in the planning for that. The kids that were in the honors track had an additional book (The Once and Future King) and assignments. We are in a process (3rd year) of changing the way we do high schools in our county to make them better, and this is one of the new things.
I always like to stop in the local bookstores, because they always have some shelves set aside just for summer reading lists from all the high schools. One of the Christian schools in our area, gives a lot more choices than all the other schools. Their list for most grades usually says something like “Read this book Whatever Classic and then pick one (or two) more from the following list:” That’s kind of neat! Of course, thinking back, we had lots of choices like that when I was in high school, just not for summer reading. I also love looking at the mix of classics and new, fiction and non, books everyone’s heard of and ones no one has, and so forth. I can’t imagine how they pick which books will be read (but that’s part of the reason I don’t teach those subjects!).
As far as does each year have any relation to the previous year – I’m stumped with that question. While it’s true that you get new teachers and your grades don’t carry over or whatever (well, except your cumulative GPA!), every year builds upon the last. I know there is some leeway there, but most school systems place their classes in a particular order for a reason. That’s especially true in math, but it does run all throughout the curriculum.
I will say that summer reading lists can bite you if you move or change schools. I was showing a new girl around the school Friday and she was sad because she couldn’t take AP English. She had no way to do all the required summer stuff before school started – but they had just made the decision to leave the private school and come to the public so her choice was to take regular English or to risk what could happen to her grade when all the assignments were due the first week of classes.
Here we have the lists at the library, and the bookstores get them too. (That’s a great source of good reading at Barnes and Noble, too - the summer reading table.) They all get it and did when I was a kid too. Maybe that’s just regional, though. Always summer reading, though. (Usually there was one paper on it, at the beginning.)
I am writing a (fictional) book about Gilgamesh. Anyone want a 7 page Sumer reading list? 'Cause I got it.
(Sorry, I couldn’t resist)
I’ve had summer reading lists from 5th grade or so. I was always in advanced classes. We’d usually have to read some percentage of the list, depending on it’s size, at our choice, until AP English when we had to read them all.
But didn’t you register for classes? We have the kids fill out what they want to take next year in late January/early February. That way the people who do the master schedule and staffing and all that have plenty of time to get everything together.
So, for example, my niece was signing up for her Junior classes last winter. She had the choice between regular English 11, English Humanities, Honors English, and AP English Comp. So she picks the one she wants and signs up for it. Then, towards the end of the year, they make the announcements of where you can go to pick up your summer reading & assignment list. She knew that she registered for Humanities and so she went and got that one – even though she didn’t have her schedule for the next year yet.
She had a slight problem at the end of her freshman year, because she wanted to take Honors English 10. In our county, you have to be recommended into Honors or AP classes. She really wanted it, and decided to impress the teacher by going ahead and reading one of the books before 9th grade was even over. Turns out, she didn’t get accepted due to her extremely poor grades that year – but this was decided before 9th grade was over and she was able to get the Humanities reading list.
The school I teach at has about 2000 students. I don’t know how many teachers are in each dept (we have 14 in math), but I know they try to keep one person teaching the different classes like that in the English dept. For example Teacher A may get all the 12th grade AP and then Teacher B will get all the 11th grade AP. In the few instances where they have to split them up, they decide the book lists together – so it won’t matter which teacher you get once schedules come out.
I had to do this in middle school. (7th and 8th grade.) But I didn’t. I managed to BS my way through whatever assignments there were that related to the books I was supposed to have read. It worked pretty well.
I have gotten As in 300-level college history courses and never even bought the textbooks for the class.
Actually, I take back my previous post. We registered and signed up for what classes we needed/wanted (I’m talking high school) about a week before the first day of school and got the schedule on the first day of school. This was in the mid-late 70’s. Public school, southeastern Wisconsin.
But all of my kids went to private schools and they never had summer reading that I recall.
Huh, that’s interesting. I wonder what they did about staffing and master schedule and all that if you guys didn’t register until that late? I’m gonna try to remember to ask some of the older teachers next week what it was like around here. I always find it fascinating to see how different school systems do things and how they change.
I know that private schools are often different than public schools when it comes to that kind of stuff. In 2000 I taught at our local Catholic high school and they didn’t have summer reading, but they have implemented it sometime between then and now. We have two different Christian schools in the area and I know I’ve seen the list for one of them at the bookstore, but I don’t remember the other one. They might have one too, and I just don’t remember, but maybe they don’t do that.
I’d guess reading lists are getting more and more common around the country, but sure aren’t everywhere yet.
In high school we had something called the modular system. It was so weird. Some classes were 1 mod long, some were 2. Sometimes you would only stay for 1 mod of a two mod class and go to another class. I had never experience anything like in in grade and middle school. The first week of my freshman year it had me completely f*cked up.
I know they got rid of that in the 80’s, as I have younger siblings who went there after me.
I didn’t get summer reading lists, but a very common first composition for any given year, in Spanish Language class, was “the book I read this summer.” I got in trouble with a couple of teachers who refused to believe that I had read the book described in that composition
Spanish “education plans” change about every 6 years, with the misfortune that myself and my two brothers suffered three different plans. Middlebro would get “exercise books” every summer; not reading lists, but books with problems to solve, for several central subjects. Neither myself nor Littlebro suffered those.
In my school there was only one class that had ANY work for the summer, and that was for the people who took AP Chemistry and Bio (same teacher), I would have taken Chem but it took up two class periods (one was for labs). You basically had to do half the book work before the year started and a large portion of your first semester grade was summer work.
I think the only reason we didn’t though was because there were no advanced classes at our high school, or rather every class was advanced. The lowest you could take in any core subject was honors, and by senior year at the very least English and History were AP (and 99% of the kids had exhausted the few non-AP maths and sciences we offered). So considering AP classes were our normal run-of-the-mill classes there was no reason to do summer work because:
You couldn’t just drop the class like in other schools.
Since it was a test-in advanced high school, and we were ranked number 1 in AP US History, English and something else as well as like 13th in the nation in US News and World Report* they didn’t see a reason they couldn’t just push us during the year, rather than “ruining” our summers.
My friend who went to a Catholic school where they had a choice, however, had tons of summer reading and such for APs and honors, I think it just has to do with how the program is tuned and whether they feel the kids need the extra work or not.
Back in the dawn of time (we are talking the Nixon administration) we had no such thing as a summer reading list, we had the dad imposed “this is what you are gonna do around the house” list until a got a summer job. I read a great deal during the summer, but not what I think would be on too many teachers reading lists.
However, there weren’t video games and the internet (ok, technically there was) or as many distractions. In my school i suspect a lot of students were in the habit of reading and the teachers could force us to read what they wanted to and most of us could do it with reasonable speed. I suspect that a lot of the reading stuff now, in Akron Ohio where I currently live, is a result of the “our kids are doing poorly in school and we need to educate them somehow all year” line of reasoning.
That’s horrible. We always give transfers more time or an alternate assignment: I let them skip the test the first day (it’s one of 6 test grades, it just makes the others count more) and they have six weeks to make up the assignment everyone else did over the summer. It’s a little challenging, but not impossible. I can’t imagine driving kids out of an AP class. But then again, I am evaluated almost entirely on the number of passes I have, so I have a pretty strong incentive to keep kids that have any chance of passing.
Summer reading lists are not new. The Betsy-Tacy books by Maude Hart Lovelace were written in the 1930s and 40s but were a highly autobiographical look at the turn of the century. In one of those books (And I can’t remember which) the kids are assigned “Ivanhoe” one summer. This was the class of 1910, in a little Minnesota town.
I agree with this. I was surprised both when I talked to a student who had to give up AP (although the small private school she was coming from didn’t offer it at all) and when I talked to a teacher, different class, who doesn’t give the student extra time. A student moving into the system didn’t just slough off and not do the work! And it’s even possible they could be moving from a school where they started whatever THAT school assigned.
Oh, and Otto, I graduated in 1994, but my 16 year old is actually our niece that we have taken in (big long crazy family tale). Now it’s true that her mom was still in high school when she got pregnant, but that’s a whole other story.
Thinking back, a lot of the books we had in summer reading were Western Canon and New Multicultural Canon things that they probably didn’t get a chance to teach during the year, but that adults ought to have read and be able to discuss. I remember reading Cry, the Beloved Country and The Good Earth and Heart of Darkness and Bartleby the Scrivener and Waiting for Godot and such. When it wasn’t for AP (you can only teach so many books during the school year and you need a good range of stuff in your head for the test) I think a lot of the thinking was “You should read this while we can still make you so you get it when somebody makes a joke about how this Godot guy never seems to get here.”
I never had a summer reading list assigned by the school. The libraries had summer reading programs where you could get rewards for reading so many books a summer, but you could read whatever books you wanted.
I was not allowed into Honors English 9 at my high school in Minnesota because I was transferring from a small junior high in Montana which did not offer separate honors classes (no reason to offer a separate class for four or five people) so they didn’t think I’d be able to hack it. About halfway through the first semester in my regular English class, my teacher asked me what the heck I was doing in his class. At that point, though, I was stuck until the next year, when he was able to insist to the guidance counselor that I be in Honors English 10.
I think it’s common for school districts to think that whatever they are doing is so utterly challenging that no other school district could possibly compare. :rolleyes:
I’ve been tempted to ask the same question as the OP. With Zits and Fox Trot being all about summer reading lists lately, I’ve been wondering just how common this is. I’ll weigh in as another person who never had any assignments over the summer when I was in high school (early 80s), even though I went to a good school, took AP English, and had plenty of assigned reading throughout the school year.
Same here. In Grade/middle school I used to go to rummage sales and buy tons of used comic books for next to nothing. Perhaps they would have helped me later on in high school when I took U.S. of Archie
