Summer Reading

Is summer reading really doing the students any good? For most schools, students are assigned a book or two to read followed by some sort of assignment relating to the material. However, these sorts of projects may not be doing as much good as expected. Summer reading should be continued but the assignments should be replaced by more in-depth tests when school begins again.

            Many will agree that in order to do well in school and in life, reading is imperative. Summer reading is supposed to make the student read, therefore improving them as students. However, any person is able to go online and get the summary of any novel or the answers to any questions. This allows the student to bypass the entire point of the assignment and still manage to get a decent grade. Even without help from the internet, students are able to find someone else who has already done the assignment, such as an older sibling or friend, and copy their ideas in their journal. This is, of course, cheating, but that somehow does not bother many students. This defeats the entire purpose of summer reading, therefore making it a useless assignment. All summer reading assignments are good for is giving work to the students who already read on their own.

            Now don’t get me wrong. I’m all for summer reading because I believe it is helpful in every aspect of life and does nothing but good. I am against the way summer reading is handled, though. Instead of having the student read the book and complete an easily cheated on assignment, the student should, instead, complete a more in-depth test in school about the novel. This eliminates many ways the student can cheat, therefore making it more credible. In-school testing will also allow the teachers to see if the student truly understood the book. This is extremely beneficial to the student and will help him greatly in the long run.

            I also believe that with a specific summer reading book assigned, reading becomes more of a chore than anything else. The entire point is to have the student want to pick up a book on their own and read, but if it is like a chore, they will not do this. A possible solution for this is to have a choice of books. Instead of having one book the student must read, give them an option of five. This way, the student is able to choose a book that appeals to him and sees reading as entertaining as well as educational. If a student is able to choose among many novels, they are more likely to find an interesting one and then seek out more like it. This gives them an assignment for school that can introduce them into a whole range of new possibilities.

            Summer reading is important to the student, whether they like it or not, but the way summer reading is handled now, it is not effective. Giving the students a choice of various novels to read, instead of one will be beneficial. Also, replacing over-the-summer assignments with in school testing will help them even more. Reading could be so much more important to the student if they were given more options and better testing.