Summer Reading

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Section I: Where We’ve Been

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Summer reading isn’t new to any of us, and it’s worth looking briefly at how it’s been approached in the past:

Summer Marginalia

In the “Some Context” section of that post, you’ll find links to a half-dozen versions of summer reading for a class like yours. And it really does provide context: For years, we’ve been trying to stave off the atrophy of those summer months by engaging you in high-level, high-interest work. A makerspace like ours would obviously take on as one of its problem-solving tasks the issue of summer reading. We have to think divergently about those months away from the classroom, the importance of reading, etc, in order to hack the experience.

Peruse that old post first, noting that “peruse” can actually mean two opposite things at once. Then move on to the actual assignment for this year’s summer reading.

One more thing: Toward the bottom of that post is a section on Reddit, an online resource that still exists for you, albeit in a kind of stasis, and I invite you to consider whether that might help this year. Reddit offers functionality that no other interstitial resource will, and it hasn’t been folded properly into Room 210 yet. (We experimented with it before in our old classroom, which wasn’t outfitted as a full makerspace.)

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Section II: The Language of Composition

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For those who need it, here is a direct link to the summer reading for AP English Language & Composition.

The purpose of this assignment is to make those who complete the reading more knowledgeable and skilled than those who don’t. Armed with the knowledge and skills from the summer reading, motivated students can take the lead in many lessons and assignments throughout the first half of the year. The fourth tier of profiles requires students to add exactly that sort of value to the learning environment.

These same motivated students can generate plenty of metacognition by attempting to link the summer reading to our work over these first few weeks. But there will be no explicit lesson that does this for you. Instead, you are expected to develop your own conclusions and connections. When you compile evidence to substantiate a higher profile score, this sort of self-sustained analysis is incredibly valuable.

If you are one of the inevitable group of students who did not complete or only partially completed this work, there is no penalty for acknowledging that truth. Consider what would happen if a student transferred into this AP course after the beginning of the year, or what would happen if a student moved to the district well into the school year: This summer reading could not be realistically assigned on top of whatever current work we have to do. Those new students would need to rely on their peers to make connections and learn those basic concepts along the way.

Put more simply and generally, this is your first example of how much more important self-assessment, collaboration, and growth are to us than any kind of perfunctory performance. Your summer reading will help you, if you did it; if you did not do it, pretending otherwise or rushing through it while juggling many other responsibilities will have exactly the opposite effect that we want.

So you are strongly encouraged to take a bit of time this week to write thoughtfully about what you completed, what that reveals about you, and how you plan to adjust now.

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Section III: BHS Summer Reading

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Now to the formal assignment, starting with this form:

You need to recognize right away that there is no penalty for acknowledging failure here, nor is there a reward for stating that you really did finish your chosen text. What you enter here is data to be discussed and analyzed as we move forward — nothing more, nothing less.

That is not to say that your choices did not matter. They mattered very much. As a student assigned one of these books, your decision tells us something about your relationship to reading and learning. It doesn’t tell us everything, however, and punishing or judging you is no more helpful right now than praising you. What matters now is the meaning you mine from those choices.

And that’s because we are really talking about your reading life. (Later, we will talk about your writing life.) For the last few months, most of you had no classes, no homework, and no immediate repercussions for your reading choices, whether you read nothing or spent each and every day reading something.

It’s that “something” that will open up the conversation. Reading does not just mean reading books, although we will emphasize the importance of literature in a moment. Your reading life includes every scrap of text you decode, from text-message conversations to Internet forum threads to fan fiction. All of that text does something to you. It increases your knowledge, shifts your perspective, opens up your emotions. Maybe it distracts you or just kills a couple of hard-to-kill hours.

One of our central goals this year is to give you an awareness of what your reading life looks like so that you can make more impactful choices. To a lesser extent, that means pushing you to experiment with more literature, but the most important aspect is your self-awareness — your constant, critical thinking about yourself. What do you read? What could you gain by changing what you read?

Again, there is no risk/reward when it comes to the facts of what you did this summer. That can’t be overstated. But we will also learn this year that not every perspective, opinion, text, etc. is equally important or meaningful. Literature does something that no other kind of reading can do:

That is the video you need to watch carefully in order to write the required response detailed in your summer reading questionnaire. (It is also detailed on Google Classroom.) You may have read a book that doesn’t quite fit this definition of literature, but you can connect any meaningful reading experience to the ideas in this video. You can talk about those ideas, even if you haven’t experienced them through your recent reading life.

Ask questions about the assignment below. To talk to each other, consider that old subreddit, Google+, and any other interstitial possibilities. Start in class, though, with a concerted attempt to use our space to learn and then to write together.

One more thing: I haven’t read it over again, but I have a feeling that there might be something worthwhile in this three-years-old post on literature in our classroom:

View at Medium.com