GHS Summertime Stories/ Summer Reading

Each AP Language student is expected to read Outliers by Malcom Gladwell by the first day of class (Thursday, August 7th).

There will be a comprehensive exam over the summer reading assignment the first week of school.

As they read, students should complete a short summary at the end of each chapter noting important takeaways in their own individual voice. Students should also complete the following annotations as they read when the author:

Makes a claim about a specific outlier
Shows how a situation is complex for an outlier
Shows tension faced by an outlier
Explains how an outlier runs counter to conventional thinking about success.

*** Annotations to not need to be on every page, nor should they interfere with the enjoyment the books offers to a reader. Annotations should represent impressions of the book and the author's argument about success. To earn full credit for annotations, you will need to not only underline & circle parts of the book but also make relevant and insightful commentary in the margins of the book along with the short summaries after each chapter. ***

ISBN: 978-0-316-01793-0

"In understanding successful people, we have come to focus far too much on their intelligence and ambition and personality traits. Instead, Malcolm Gladwell argues in Outliers, we should look at the world that surrounds the successful, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way, Gladwell reveals what the Beatles and Bill Gates have in common, the reason you've never heard of the smartest man in the world, why almost no star hockey players are born in the fall, and why, when it comes to plane crashes, where the pilots are born matters as much as how well they are trained. The loves of outliers- people whose achievements fall outside normal experience- follow a peculiar and unexpected logic, and in uncovering that logic, Gladwell presents a fascinating and provocative blueprint for making the most of human potential."

Please email: Lburleson@gunterisd.org if you have any questions.