Dieran Ruggerio
Mr. Lowenberg
Creative Writing
25 March 2019
The Reading Retrofit
Most students remember those pointless assignments, that led nowhere in the grand scheme of things and didn’t relate at all to class. Or the teachers spoke so highly about it that it seemed almost religious, then assigned an essay which was inevitably forgotten. . No discussion or anything just an essay and done. WASTED TIME! What students opine against is the awful practice of summer reading. Oh it is something to keep the students thinking over the summer, they come back with a head start in English class. Most teachers say it smells like an A, most students say it smells like B.S. Many young learners experiences with summer reading were only entertaining a handful of times and the rest they were stuck reading pure literature crap against their will. The current state of this banal reading system is to read a book selected by the board of education and write an essay on it that simply gets graded and pushed aside. The goal here ladies and gentlemen is to rework this broken system with a more interactive and meaningful one. It’s not too late to repair this flawed system of false education.
The experience of summer reading to most students is a long and drawn out process. It is June, another year in the dust, and these young intellectuals finally get out of school for a well deserved break. Except it isn’t a break, it is a long summer time class and the end is the classroom students return to in September having done one big homework assignment. Students are told to read a preselected book and write an essay on it which will be graded at the start of school. It is even worse when the preselected book is pure and utter trash, so bad that not even their family members won’t read it for entertainment. Next, the types of readers that are encountered in the summer reading assignment. There are fine lines between summer readers, the slackers, the screw-ers, and the readers. The slackers wait until one month before school then try to read the whole thirty chapter book and write the five paragraph essay. Then the screw-ers who just say screw it, no reading here just another A+ for a superbly faked essay. Finally the readers, who ultimately get screwed for their hard work by getting the same grade for wasting away summer days as someone who didn’t read and had their whole summer.
For this retrofit to be realized in a manner pleasurable for everyone, a few things must happen. First off, educators must realize the issue here and start conversing with students to see what they dislike about the topic. Second, some changes that can be made are allowing students to pick the books. Not just write an essay on the summer reading but students can also engage in a collective group activity where they share their experience and the book they chose. Third, instead of lasting all of a week, why not two or three weeks to cover everything in detail. A lot of intrinsic value placed on the discussion is being missed by the educators and young readers. Not like the current monotonous system where students are given a curriculum filler slapped in between two covers after completing a year of school and are told to read it over a “BREAK”. Then upon returning find out that there are only a few students who actually read, and the others will still pass without even touching the book itself. Due to the fact that all they have to do is write a convincing essay that sounds as if they performed only a cursory read.
Ultimately this system is broken, flawed, and devoid of authenticity. But it can be salvaged, the ship has not yet sunk and the system of summer reading can be interactive and meaningful. By giving the young readers the freedom of choosing, adding more time in the curriculum for discussions on summer reading, and bringing the issue into the spotlight it can change. There just needs to be a little noise and chaos to effect the glacial pace of change.