A teacher's domain of literary pain.
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As a teacher, I know it's the end of the summer when parents stop asking about where my family has traveled in June or which camps my kids may have attended in July and move toward more business-like queries about the school year looming ahead. Recently, I was watching my daughter Poppy attempt to do something called "simple changes" on a Welsh pony named Tapdance. A fellow horseparent seated next to me asked what I considered a very loaded question: "Do you give summer reading?" I guessed by her leading tone and Clint Eastwood eyes that the idea of turning pages in off-hours wasn't sitting well with her. I was right. As Tapdance kicked up dirt clouds, and Poppy steered the horse in ways I couldn't distinguish, the mom complained about her daughter having to read three books over the summer and write essays on them. "Can you believe that?" she asked with the type of intonation usually reserved for rubberneckers at a carnival freak show.
I can believe it, actually. The debate over summer reading surfaces twice every year as I hand out the books in May, and again in the fall when I hope that my students have actually cracked the covers. In years past, I assigned two novels and a slim book of poetry but cut back after the incessant screaming punctured an eardrum. Now I hand out only one lonely novel and even that poor bastard gets complaints.
"But it's summer!" the students cry when they see the stack teetering on my desk.
"Don't we do enough already?" another adds as if reading was some form of Gitmo torture technique.
"And look at how small this type is!" a math whiz whines, pulling out a ruler and calculator. "Oh God, 272 whole pages."
The problem with summer reading is the same problem with teaching: Every kid is different. If all my student were avid readers, curled up with the latest Booker Prize winner instead of their cell phones or PlayStations, there'd be no need for such superfluous assignments. However, most teenagers in America are more likely to pick up a remote than a book if given an hour of free time. There are exceptions, but such bookworms are unlikely to volunteer the fact that, for them,
Jane Eyre
rocks harder than 50 Cent.
The irony of this biblio brouhaha is that the parents and students who cry the loudest about the injustices of summer reading are the ones most likely to wail about low standardized test scores. Even though I think the SATs and ACTs accurately measure a student's intelligence the same way a Magic 8-ball can give good relationship advice, I know that the best way to do well on the verbal part of any of those fascist tests is to read and read some more. In one of my classes a few years back, I had two girls who had perfect scores on the verbal section of the SATs. When word got out (and word always gets out), their classmates peppered them with questions, trying to elicit the secret formula to SATisfaction:
"How many times did you take the Kaplan course?"
"Drill and kill 45 words a day?"
"Chug ginkgo biloba?
"Make out with a guy from Mensa?"
The well-prepared pair just shrugged and said that they'd always loved reading, ever since they were children. In fact, they both had door stoppers (lengthy novels) under their backpacks to pull out when my lectures got a tad long-winded.
Personally, I wish I had been given a summer list as a kid. Neither of my parents were avid readers and there wasn't much in terms of literature lying around our split-level ranch. I tried becoming deeply involved with the
Joy of Cooking
but the plot was thin, and I subsequently developed an unnatural affinity for aprons. Looking back, I realize that a summer reading list would have served me in so many ways. Besides improving my academic performance and feeding my dream of becoming a writer, reading, as I know now, would have cultivated an internal life separate from my parents, brothers, or even the teachers who would have given the assignment. As any lover of literature knows, good books offer a world where you can wrestle with the complexities that life constantly offers. In a novel, you can spend extended time trying to understand people in ways we never get to in our real and hurried lives. In poems, you can dance with questions of relationship, philosophy, or the wonder and mystery of the natural world. In memoirs, you can study how one person has tried to make sense of his or her life in narrative form. If people truly want summer to be a season of slowing down, books are the best speed bumps I know of.
Sadly, the summer reading controversy is not going away soon. In order to stop the "summer brain drain," public and private schools across the country still assign books beginning as early as kindergarten. The lists range from one novel to a "suggested" lineup of a dozen essential texts that will be referred to in English class all year long. On the other end of the spectrum, some institutions have opted to reduce the summer reading by having the whole school read the same book. In an extreme case of hating both the player and the game, a father sued a school district on behalf of his son, citing that assignments during school breaks were both unreasonable and beyond the realm of the teacher's power. Either way the pendulum swings, I'm glad we're still discussing books even if its housed in some "to be or not to be" debate. But now another summer has ended and my students will be inside my realm of power, reading their little asses off.
