OPINION: Is summer reading worth it?

%28Photo+courtesy+of+Joshua+Rothhaas+%28CC+BY+2.0%29%29+Every+year%2C+English+teaches+assign+students+books+to+read+throughout+the+summer+but+is+the+stress+really+worth+it%3F

(Photo courtesy of Joshua Rothhaas (CC BY 2.0)) Every year, English teaches assign students books to read throughout the summer but is the stress really worth it?

By Lucia Campiglia, Correspondent

Everyone understands the constant thought throughout the entire month of August. The thought that haunts your brain. Summer reading. We spend  weeks reading some of these books, but the real question is, is reading a series of books throughout the summer really necessary?

After speaking with a variety of students, the majority of them said that they don’t ever come back to school and talk about their books.

“[We spent] like three days talking about the book and that included going over the assignment and reading the short story we had to compare our books to” junior Gemma Stille said.

Most of the students explained how they didn’t talk about their books, , there was  however a small group of people that explained that they did talk about the books .

“I’m in AP Literature and so far, we had to read [three different books] and we have been working on [one of the books] since the beginning of school up until about two weeks ago and we just started talking about the second one.” senior Samantha Bernstein said. “We have been using them quite a lot”.  

Supervisors of the english department make all students read these booksㅡwhich don’t even interest the majority of the student bodyㅡand expect every single student to put in 100% effort into doing so when students know they will probably only skim over it during the first week of school. After talking to the english department supervisor, Ms. Casais, I learned the reason as to why we have summer reading. She said  it is used by teachers to keep student’s brains working over the summer, a time when we are probably not reading. I believe that all students having a mandatory summer reading assignment is wasting people’s time and money. Considering that the only classes that actually talk about the books are the AP classes, it should only be a requirement for those selected classes. Instead of having us read a book in the summer, they should give us another assignment that will actually be utilized when we go to back to school.

Some ideas that can replace summer reading for the CPA and Honors classes could be to read articles, do research on the books we will read throughout the year, or try to talk about the books for the first couple of weeks.

Hopefully something can be done about this situation soon because a large part of the student body, including myself, do not want to waste their time doing something pointless.