School Assigned Summer Reading: Pros and Cons

With summer upon us, I’d like to say that I’ve been ignoring school and going about my happy life without a care in the world. Unfortunately, that is nowhere near true. Just like most of us, I have this fun little thing about summer reading.

Summer reading has never bothered me as much as it may irk other people. Reading is easy for me, obviously, since I do it a lot, so it doesn’t take a ton of effort to pick up a book and spend a few hours getting through it. Although I find most of the books assigned by school boring, I’ve found a few gems during some of the books – it was a pleasant surprise to be able to read The Fault in Our Stars (John Green) in the summer before eighth grade, and just last year I got to take my pick of a long list of books and ended up reading Station 11 (Emily St. John Mandel), Hamnet (Maggie O’Farrell), Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier), and Life of Pi (Yann Martel), all of which I actually enjoyed. But although there are times when summer reading is useful and ingrained into an English course, such as this past year when I had to write a research paper on one of the books I read over the summer, it feels like very often the reading holds little purpose during the school year. In my experience, we often take a quiz or write an essay about a book at the beginning of the year, to make sure that we actually read it, and then ignore it for the rest of the time until your teacher says “Oh, there will be questions on the summer reading books on the final!” So today, I wanted to discuss some of the pros and the cons of school required summer reading.

Pro: Summer reading can provide an introduction to a course.

Oftentimes, summer reading books are directly related to the books and analysis that get studied later on in the school year. By reading books before the course begins, students are becoming familiarized with the type of material that they will see later on, sometimes without even knowing. Moreover, English curriculums are often quite packed, so the ability to assign books to read before the school year even begins allows for more time and room to read and study other books, all while continuing to gain the knowledge of what occurs in summer reading books, and the introduction of what is to come.

Con: Summer reading often does not feel integrated into the actual course.

Regardless of how connected a book is in themes or ideas to the rest of an English course, it can sometimes be very difficult to connect those themes, and summer reading books are often not talked about enough during the school year for students to be able to recognize and apply those themes to the rest of the course. By reading a book BEFORE the course occurs, students do not know what to search for when analyzing the book – they are not given a particular aim or position to study. This means that without spending enough time discussing and pulling apart a book during the actual course, the summer reading is rendered mostly useless. Students cannot be expected to look at the book in a certain way unless they are specifically instructed to do so; after all, it is impossible to read a book from all the angles it hits at once.

Pro: Summer reading allows students to view a book in a different way from the way they view books during the school year.

As mentioned in the above con, students are not usually asked to analyze a book from any specific point of view during their summer reading. This means that if the book is discussed and analyzed during the school year, students get a very different way of analyzing from the way they generally study books during the school year. Instead of reading bits and sections of the book, dissecting it as they go, they are reading an entire book, almost as a pre-read, without the guidance of an English class to help them pull it apart. Students only actually get into the analyzation of the book once they enter English class, and are able to look back on the book as a whole. This allows students to see the full picture – instead of just looking at one section or another, they can see themes that stretch across the entire book, or more easily recognize motifs. Although a different way from how many English classes function during the year, it’s not a bad way to utilize once in a while.

Con: Summer reading can discourage students from reading for their own enjoyment

Generally, summer is supposed to be a break from school, a time when you can let loose and have a little fun before returning to classes and structure every single day. Even if you have a job, or you’re doing some sort of camp, it’s still a welcome change in routine from school. So requiring students to then read books over the summer kind of defeats the purpose of this. For some people, it’s no big deal. I just see summer reading as another, slightly more boring, book that I want to read this summer. I’ll read it in the first month of vacation, zip through it, and ultimately forget about it in a week (and then read it again in the last week of break so I can actually remember what happened). But for others, who don’t read as much as us book bloggers do, reading a school required book over the summer can be a huge chore, and ultimately can discourage them from reading in general. Picking up any book over the summer feels like summer reading, and that knowledge that you’re required to read some book or another will make you less interested in reading for fun. Just like during the school year, sometimes required reading can leak into more than just what is required, ultimately ruining enjoyment around all books. No, I’m not saying we should stop reading any book in English class – it’s obviously an integral part of a class. But summer readings’ impact on a time that should be enjoyed and relaxing should be considered.

Pro: Summer reading can provide additional material for later in the English course

Similar to my first pro, summer reading can absolutely be important material to study and analyze within an English course. As mentioned previously, due to the limited amount of time English teachers actually have to teach, reading books before the class even starts is time saving, and it also provides more material to work from when doing projects or essays later in the course. To give an example, two years ago I took an American literature class and we were assigned to read American Street (Ibi Zoboi) and The Prince of Los Cocuyos (Richard Blanco). American Street follows the protagonist’s move to Detroit from Haiti and her struggles after her mother is detained and she must move in with her cousins on her own. Prince of Los Cocuyos is a memoir that follows the childhood of inagural poet Richard Blanco, as a gay, latino boy in Miami. Later in the year, when we had to do a multi-week project on a ‘moral dilemma’ in America – an overarching inequality such as housing, transportation, or education, we were required to use one or both of these books to reference within the presentation. In this scenario, not only were we using these books within the actual course, but referencing them in the presentation required us to dissect them in a specific way that we may not have seen when reading it over the summer.

Well that’s it for this post! Thanks for reading the post that became an idea at 9:30 PM and was hastily written right then – I hope it at least made a little sense and you enjoyed it at least a little! What are your thoughts on summer reading? Do you have any additional pros or cons you want to add to my list? Let me know in the comments!