Did your school system have this? I always have heard about schools issuing reading lists for children to read over their summer vacation.
I never ran across it in real life, but then I went to school in the 50s.
Did any one here have summer reading lists? Were they required? And if so how did it work? How would they grade you? Summer is when you move from one grade to the next so how could it count against you?
The only summer I was required to read was between junior and senior years and that’s because I wanted to get into an advanced English class. To be eligible we had to have read 3 specific classics and be ready to discuss them when school started. For reference, I graduated in 87.
My son who is entering 8th grade in the fall has never been given a required summer reading list.
In my son’s high school, students in the honors English classes have specific summer reading assignments, pretty much as Rhiannon8404 described. Students in the regular English classes are expected to read at least one book of at least 200 pages, but it can be any book they choose.
I didnt but I went to school in the late 80s.
My entering-7th-grade kid had to do summer reading starting last summer. She’s in honors but all kids have it, the selections are just different.
FWIW, this summer she has to read The Hobbit and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, so it’s not exactly onerous. She hasn’t read them yet but last year it was a test on one and a short paper on the other so she doesn’t want too much time between reading them and getting graded on her knowledge of them. 
Class of 97 here, we always had summer reading lists. Sometimes there would be a small assignment or a test or paper about them in the fall, but often I think they were a way to cram in a bit more of the Western Canon on ya.
I’m a librarian now and believe you me they are alive and well so PLEASE do not wait until August to come in with your list! You know good and well hundreds of other kids need the same books!
The lower tracks seem to read a lot of popular young adult stuff of the type where the mother dies, with a smattering of diversity-oriented nonfiction. Gifted kids get the old classics and things we used to get like Night, Their Eyes Were Watching God, One Hundred Years of Solitude, A Gathering of Old Men, etc.
I’m just returned from an extended family vacation at which a 15 year old niece brought a 15 year old female friend to keep the niece occupied and out from under the adult’s feet. The friend attends a “non-denominational Christian school. She brought one of her assigned books. Quo Vadis, for Pete’s sake. Now, I’m nearly 70 years old and I couldn’t make it through the first paragraph. How is a 15 year old suppose to fight through 500 or 600 pages of that dredge?
My take on this is that the reading lists are usually optional, and include recommended reading for the summer, and are not required reading. I’ve run summer reading programs for kids that were like this (actually co-ran, with a librarian). I also have a book that winds up on a lot of those lists so I find them by self-googling, and they seem to be completely optional. The books also skew “fun.”
Evidence is overwhelming that kids who don’t read at all in the summer take a step back, so schools are doing more to promote reading and have incentives like book parties, rewards, etc.
I was in the honors English classes all through high school (from 1999-2003), so I had summer reading every year except my freshman year – though by the time I was a senior, the honors freshmen had summer reading too, so I guess we just got lucky. We had to keep journals about all the books and we’d have discussions and tests on said books when we started the class each year, so that was how we got graded on the reading.
The lists were never terribly long…I think the most I ever had to read were 4 books and there’d inevitably be a play in there among the novels. And the teachers did a fair job of mixing up classics and contemporary stuff, especially by the time I got to AP English, so it wasn’t too difficult to deal with for the most part. I still have most of my summer reading books and I occasionally dig them up and reread them for fun.
As for other schools, I’ve noticed that my local library has a separate summer reading section with a lot of notices posted about shortened checkout times for those books so more people can get ahold of copies. I’m guessing that the city high school has a much more expansive summer reading program than my school did, since the number of books on the library shelves would’ve more than handled the 20 honors students vying for each title. Regular track English didn’t have a reading list, at least not at the time.
I never received a summer reading list. I went to school in the 60s and 70s, for reference.
However, at that time, a lot of schools were experimenting with different standards. For instance, I never learned to diagram a sentence, and while I’m a bit curious about how it works, I don’t feel a pressing need to learn this skill at the age of 53.
We had summer reading lists for honors English all the way through high school (19991-1995).
I teach high school now and I actually think the summer assignment thing is getting out of hand: in my school (and I don’t think this is uncommon), many AP classes have some sort of summer assignment–a book for most history/social studies and English classes, problem sets for AP Chem and AP Physics and I think AP Environmental Science.
I actually hate them with a passion. I’ve reduced my own to just “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” and will dump that as soon as my old-fashioned department chair retires. They are a huge pain in the ass. Half the kids don’t do them–in a good year. Probably 15% have vaguely plausible reasons why not, but frankly they are too much trouble to verify (I wasn’t here last year/I was out that week with flu and no one told me/I was in so-and-so’s regular English class and she didn’t tell me). So either I start the year with half the kids failing, and risk seriously alienating good kids with legitimate excuses, or I make a million exceptions and discredit the effort of the kids who did do it as well as starting the year by rewarding, in some cases, flagrant dishonesty.
They also do crap work. Reading a whole book with no discussion means many of them will get confused early on and since they are confused they will skim the whole thing with no real understanding. If they are supposed to write an essay, they just fill the page with words. They don’t know me, they have no incentive to work at a level that will impress me, I’m not there to reinforce the purpose and the mechanics of the assignment. They just want to push through it with a minimum of thought.
And beyond that, knowing that so many people won’t do the assignment or won’t do it in any meaningful way means there’s no point in making it really important: if it’s crucial, I need them all to do it, which means I need to be in daily contact. But if it’s not crucial, it’s busy work, and it seems insulting to the kids to take up their summer with busywork.
I think I had one between my freshman and sophomore year (class of '04). Yeah, I did. I was supposed to read three books. I read one of them, because it was short, and we didn’t do a thing with them the next year.
My 10th grade English teacher mailed us a summer reading list in June. I threw it in the trash, and on the first day of school acted all surprised and pretended I never received or heard about the notice.
The summer is MY time, not his!
BTW, the books were I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings and Romeo and Juliet.
Here at the library we go to some trouble to get the lists for all the schools, by the way, because people come in all the time just assuming we know what their kids are supposed to read.
If those of you never had this are really curious, here’s an example - this is the list for my high school, minus the AP English students.
Grade 9—English Summer Reading Assignment (CP/Regular)
You are REQUIRED to read TWO books: the required reading for your grade level and one other on the list. When you begin your English class, you will participate in two activities related to your summer reading. You are required to complete your summer reading assignment before the beginning of school.
1.Required—We Beat the Street—Davis, Jenkins, Hunt (Draper)
2.The Water is Wide—Conroy
3.House on Mango Street-- Cisneros
4.I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This—Woodson
5.All American Girl—Cabot
6.The Pact: Three Young Men Make a Promise to Fulfill a Dream— Davis, Jenkins, and Hunt
7.Soldier Boys— Hughes
8.Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years—Delany, Delany, and Hearth
9.Biography or autobiography of a well-known person (i.e. politician, athlete, etc.)
Grade 10–English Summer Reading Assignment (CP/Regular)
You are REQUIRED to read TWO books: the required reading for your grade level and one other on the list. When you begin your English class, you will participate in two activities related to your summer reading. You are required to complete your summer reading assignment before the beginning of school.
1.Required—The Last Lecture—Pausch
2. The Lords of Discipline–Conroy
3 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings— Angelou
4 Catcher in the Rye— Salinger
5. The Lovely Bones— Seibold
6. Making the Rounds with Oscar—Dosa
7. House of the Scorpion— Farmer
8. Tuesdays with Morrie–Albom
9. Hawksong— Atwater-Rhodes
10. Biography or autobiography of a well-known person (i.e. politician, athlete, etc.)
Grade 11–English Summer Reading Assignment (CP/Regular)
You are REQUIRED to read TWO books: the required reading for your grade level and one other on the list. When you begin your English class, you will participate in two activities related to your summer reading. You are required to complete your summer reading assignment before the beginning of school.
1.Required—A Lesson Before Dying—Ernest Gaines
2.Catcher in the Rye—J.D. Salinger
3.Cat’s Cradle—Kurt Vonnegut
4.Native Son—Richard Wright
5.Prince of Tides—Pat Conroy
6.A Farewell to Arms—Ernest Hemingway
7.The Killer Angels—Michael Shaara
8.Makes Me Wanna Holla—Nathan McCall
9.Bailey’s Café—Gloria Naylor
10. Biography or autobiography of a well-known person (i.e. politician, athlete, etc.)
Grade 12—English Summer Reading Assignmen (CP/Regular)
You are REQUIRED to read TWO books: the required reading for your grade level and one other on the list. When you begin your English class, you will participate in two activities related to your summer reading. You are required to complete your summer reading assignment before the beginning of school.
1.Required—The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time—Haddon*
2.Pride and Prejudice—Jane Austen
3.Slaughterhouse Five—Kurt Vonnegut
4.The Kite Runner—Khaled Hosseini
5.White Noise—Don DeLillo
6.Cold Mountain—Charles Frazier
7.How to Read Literature Like a Professor—Foster
8.Biography or autobiography of a well-known person (i.e. politician, athlete, etc.)
*This book contains a few instances of language that may be objectionable. You may read selection #2 as an alternate.
Tuesdays with Morrie? Ugh.
We had summer reading in the military school I went to in the 70’s. At first it would invariably be one good book and one truly excruciating experience. Unless you were unfortunate to have the teacher I had junior and senior years, at which point it was just bad.
I was already a voracious reader, so all summer reading with that guy did for me was give me an occasional book that I HAD to read, that instead of the usual pleasurable experience, was the literary equivalent of root canal. It turned me off of at least two authors for life, and I am sure did the same or worse for many others.
Of course earlier teachers had through summer reading introduced me to Orwell and Harper Lee, so there is a tradeoff!
I went to school in the 80s and we had this. In earlier years everyone had to read the same book (I remember one year it was to Kill a Mockingbird) and in later years we got to pick from a list.
The funny thing is, I loved to read and would end up reading a bunch on my own over the summer but for some reason I would always put this off until (literally, some summers) the last minute.
I never had a reading list, but I did nothing but read and swim all summer anyway. If I could have read and swum at the same time, I would have.
I was talking to my niece last year when she was just beginning her senior year in high school and she was telling me about her summer reading list. I can’t remember any titles specifically but I couldn’t believe how depressing the list was. I don’t think there was anything on there that had any humor, optimism, inspiration, or any sort of encouraging themes. You can’t just have a steady diet of, as Sweetums says, “root canal.”
I was in school in the early 90s, and the only year that I had required reading was my senior year for AP English. We read Great Gatsby, Song of Solomon, Grapes of Wrath, and Cry the Beloved Country. We had to keep a reading journal about all four of them, and had to do some kind of test/paper and discussion once we came back.
The high school I was teaching at up until last year has required reading for all English classes. I taught 9th grade, so know the most about that. For a couple of years, they were all supposed to read Shift, then the honors kids had to also read The Once and Future King. A couple of years ago, they switched to Hunger Games for everyone and Nefertiti for the Honors kids. They had a small assignment over the summer, and then a larger one when they came back. Kids new to our school were given the first grading period to complete the assignments.
I was always surprised when I would hear older kids talking about their AP classes, because many of them were one book, possibly two, with no assignment until they came back. Of course, I’m also surprised listening to the high school kids at any grade/ability level, because they never read near as many books as we did when I was in school. I guess that’s just me getting older, ha ha ha! There are other classes/requirements that seem harder than when I was in school, so it’s a trade off.
I’d heard Hunger Games was required reading and didn’t quite believe it. Selective reading, fine, but it’s not a “must read to graduate high school” kind of book in my opinion.
Class of 1982, from a high school in Northern Virginia. Honors English all 4 years, and never a summer reading list.
Zsofia, you’re making me feel undereducated. Of the lists you provide, I’ve read one (Pride and Prejudice). And I think I read the short version of *Tuesdays *in a Readers Digest. A large percentage of the rest I’ve never even *heard *of. :(:eek:
I graduated high school in 1985, and I never had any summer reading or other assignments. And I did take AP English all four years of high school, and we did a substantial amount of reading throughout the school year.
Summer was for reading what I wanted to read. But maybe nowadays, kids are less likely to read books on their own, when books have to compete with all the other modern forms of entertainment available.
If memory serves, nothing I was required to read for any of my high school English classes was contemporary (i.e. written since I was born), which is another difference between my experience and what kids seem to be doing nowadays, according to posts like Zsofia’s.