Summer work. These two words can send a stressful shiver down the backs of Scituate High School students every August. The last two weeks of summer are spent flipping pages, writing essays and relearning those math or foreign language packets before heading back for another year.
The Scituate High version of summer reading was converted during the 2011-2012 school year into a choice book for students and a book group format. This adapted, but continued in effect this year as well. Before that it was A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, and then Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robinson. The incoming and returning high school students were forced to read these books and do a short assignment on them. With the beginning of the past two years, the students began to have a choice in the books they read. And although I chose my book about the lives of people in North Korea, as I opened it the week before the doors of SHS were to open I found myself asking why on earth I had ever chosen this book.
Proving to be interesting, my forced fast pace kept my mind aimed straight for the finish line as I zoomed through the book, eager to be done with it. The work (six pages in total) seemed to be too much for a summer assignment I would receive a mere twenty-five points for in my English class. And upon concluding this work, on top of my four other books, sixty quote analysis assignment, a five page essay and Spanish packet, I was prepared to draw the line on the absurdity of outside summer reading.
So as I began composing my article I meant to convince the SHS population that school wide summer reading was useless, pointless and just another book to read on top of all those others. Maybe useful for incoming freshman who have little to read and little to do, but I had always imagined the point of this assignment was to take away from the load of summer work presented by other classes. With this in mind, I was angered by the time and effort required to get my twenty points and so began my quest to scathe the idea of it at all.
Yet, it was an interview I conducted with English Department Head Mr. Lynch that left me at a standstill just days before my deadline. Every argument in my head was matched with insight on the process and why it was a truly great method.
One of the intentions of school wide summer reading is to restore the fun in reading. My minor twenty-five points were because students need to learn how to read not just for the grade, but for the enjoyment of it. It is a way to engage students in a title of their interest. With the old books Mr. Lynch noted, “some students could hook into the title, but we really wanted to give the the students a choice.” That choice is what saved me from reading about the technological makeup of rock band speakers in Look me in the Eye, and let me learn more about North Koreans. To some that subject would be bland, to others like me it was engaging.
Next year Mr. Lynch foresees students nominating their own titles, and quite possibly running their own book groups with a teacher supervisor. The great thing is that the entire school is brought a little bit closer together for those 88 minutes of discussion. Teachers, administrators, and even counselors filled every room of SHS to conduct book groups without writing an essay about it, or using quotes, sticky notes and indexes for every discussion point.
This activity shows that all adults read– from Mr. Seward in the Gym to Mrs. Mohr in guidance. it’s not just the English teachers and the enthusiam that comes from all of them is true to real life enthusiam and enjoyment of reading books. “It’s the power of writing and the power ideas,” said Mr. Lynch. That is what students should take away from school wide summer reading, and that’s what I hope that they do.”