BHS Summer Reading
Your formal assignment starts with this form:
There is context at the top of the form itself, but it’s most important that you acknowledge this: There is no penalty for having failed to do the summer reading. There is also no reward for saying you did do it. This form is gathering data about your choices, and we will analyze and discuss those choices, good or bad, as we move forward.
That is not to say that your choices did not matter. They mattered very much. As a student assigned to read two of these books, your decisions tell us something about your relationship to reading and learning. It’s more useful to focus on that than to judge or praise you. What matters now is the meaning we can mine from your choices.
What w are really talking about is 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, even if 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. We will discuss your possible focuses for writing in class.
In the video talking about literature I found that it was a very descriptive and helpful to understand what literature is and what it is use for.
I agree that literature prepares you for failure because in books many people fail and then succeed.
In the video is talked about what literature is and why its good have and use in writing.
In the video, it describes books as a good way of gaining experiences and seeing things from other perspectives. What would you think of youtube and watching videos from there? It certainly shows you other experiences from other points of view.
I agree that reading literature is like therapy for some. It allows you to let go and join the character in the plot.