Everybody knows about the “negative learning” effect of July and August. Students enter the next grade in September having lost knowledge and proficiencies that they possessed in May.
One crucial area of decline is in reading levels, which is why summer reading is so important. Not necessarily summer homework reading, but reading of any sustained kind. (For a debate on summer homework, see this New York Times roundtable with abundant comments.) It doesn’t have to be classics and great books, just more or less challenging and interesting books and shorter pieces that pull an hour or two a day out of the vacationing and working teens’ leisure time.
Yes, the better the materials, the better the experience, but if we aim for sustaining the elements that make students handle the following year’s biology and social studies textbooks, it may be that the page count matters as much as the quality of the books. To put it bluntly, a 15-year-old racing through 10 young adult romances or adventure stories or sports bios or vampire tales may get more literacy benefit than a 15-year-old struggling through A Tale of Two Cities over the same period of time. Sheer volume has its advantages.
So, parents and teachers should fill up the summer schedule with a list of books. Initiatives like this one should be amplified. We need to find enriching stories that appeal to teenage sensibilities and that still have an invigorating dose of vocabulary, plot, and cultural stuff inside. For boys in particular, who read on their own a lot less than girls, books such as Bernard Cornwell’s historical novels (killer soldiers in the Napoleonic wars, the Civil War, Agincourt, and others) are great.
For younger children, too, parents should keep up the habit. Awhile back, the American Library Association had a campaign to urge parents to read to small children 15 minutes a day. That’s not enough. We need a full hour with one story—phase out the books with pictures, select those with “slow” plots and a few duplicitous characters, make your child hold something that happened 10 pages back in mind for further developments . . . Cultivate the habit of concentration, pass along an appreciation of the written word, teach them the joy of seclusion. And, of course, remove the laptop from the bedroom, confiscate the iPhone, close the Facebook account . . .
13 Responses to Summer Reading Push
jffoster - May 15, 2010 at 5:56 pm
Pretty cooperative I was with the school during the Academic Year when I was in high school. But Summertime was mine to read what I wanted to read and as much as I wanted to read — which was a good deal. And I would not have tolerated the school’s interference and presuming upon my Summer just as I did not tolerate occasional school attempts to control my private life (trying to tell me what organizations I could belong to for instance.).
jffoster - May 15, 2010 at 7:07 pm
An addendum — forgot to include it above: Mark, you say “For boys in particular, who read on their own a lot less than girls, books such as Bernard Cornwell’s historical novels (killer soldiers in the Napoleonic wars, the Civil War, Agincourt, and others) are great.”is the jr. high boy who likes to read real history instead of story books about it to be excused the story books? Most of my summer reading from upper grade school on was in the 940′s and 970s, with a fair amount in the 600s. And it was the descriptions of Austerlizt and Borodino that first drew me to War & Peace, not a bunch of academic literary hoo ha. Though I concede it is a pretty good story book. One of the reasons I started teaching myself Russian–which I wouln’t have had time to do had the schools tried to direct and control my Summer.
luther_blissett - May 15, 2010 at 8:42 pm
How about a summer monastery or nunnery camp? Children could be forced to be silent, could be forcibly kept away from modern technology, and could be told to use their time in any of several pre-modern activities: scrivening, illuminating manuscripts, making homemade ale and wine, tending to medicinal herb gardens, reading silently and alone, meditation, prayer, and preserving foodstuffs.
markbauerlein - May 16, 2010 at 9:27 am
I presume that behind Luther’s comment is the idea that kids are too controlled by parents and schools. Perhaps that’s true of the “overachievers,” kids who attend elite private high schools and colleges such as Penn, but they make up a tiny portion of the teen population. In truth, as piles of survey research keeps showing (Pew, Kaiser, HSSSE, Bureau of Labor Stats, Nielsen, NAEP, . . .), young people overall have never been so independent of adult influence, and technology is one of the reasons why. A little more time “reading silently and alone” is a needed thing.Question for jffoster: Are you saying that Cornwell’s novels aren’t a good and entertaining exercise?
jffoster - May 16, 2010 at 11:51 am
Answer to Mark’s 4: No. Ive actually read a couple of the Cornwell Sharpe’s This or That novels and they’re prett good. And have seen a number of the Masterpiece Theatre renditions. But my impression, possibly erroneous, is that you and the people pushing extend-school-into-Summer value reading fiction and “literature” more than you do the reading of nonfiction. And the desire seems to be not so much that the kid read, but that he get “deep meaning” and literary analyses out of it. Or learn how to “properly” manufacture some to read into it. Can’t speak for Luther, but I certainly think schools do tend to try to become total institutions and control students’ extracurricular and extramural lives. ccf now too the “cocurricular” requirement movement in colleges!) And I suggest that rather than spend time during Summer vacation with school-assigned Moby Dick, a boy (or for that matter a girl) might well gain more maturity spending some time fishing for Moby Bass.
luther_blissett - May 17, 2010 at 2:07 am
I just think kids need some time for something else entirely. Sure, it would be great if they all read something, or lots of something, during the summer. And sure, it would be great if they spent less time in front of the New Idiot Box (the computer).But they need time to form bands. I spent an entire summer with my brother and his friends recreating U2′s *Joshua Tree* LP on our 4-track cassette machine. I miss that time. If I had been reading edifying historical fiction, I wouldn’t now be able to play every lick by Jimmy Page and Pete Townsend. I’m being flippant, but still.
mkpeterson - May 17, 2010 at 7:23 am
I have a son who has never much liked to read to himself for pleasure (although that is changing now, as he is now given to walking around the house with his nose in such literary gems as the Wimpy Kid and Captain Underpants books) (he is 9 and finishing the 3rd grade). But he loves to be read to, and one of our great summer pleasures comes from having so much more time to read aloud, first thing in the morning, in the evening, on hot or rainy afternoons… Right now we’re reading Tom Sawyer (for the second time–we first read it two summers ago), and are thinking of reading Treasure Island next, perhaps to be followed by Five Children and It, and The Secret Garden, and The Princess Bride… Oh, and he just asked if we can re-read Scott Corbett’s “Trick” series of books (The Lemonade Trick, The Mailbox Trick…)–so of course we will.How did he get to be so good a listener? Well, some kids are more given to this than others, but make no mistake–this is an ability I have nurtured him him, by reading to him for hours and hours and hours, so that he has been able to develop the capacity to sustain attention and enjoy description and follow a complex plot over hundreds of pages. (He’s a fidgety kid, so mostly he draws while I read–it helps him to have something to do with his hands.) Listening to long books read aloud is not something people (children or adults) can do naturally, so if you want your child to be able to do it, you have to put in the time to read to him or her, every single day, basically from birth.Let’s not bash picture books, though, whether for younger or older kids! Before I was a parent, I knew the classic children’s books, including picture books; but one of the great pleasures of parenthood, for me, has been discovering the quality and range of modern illustrated children’s books, which include many for older children. (Speaking of which, have you read Brian Selznick’s “The Invention of Hugo Cabret”? It is truly in a class by itself–rush out and read it right now!) And while 15 minutes of reading a day may not be “enough” (I can’t imagine limiting myself or my son to fifteen minutes of read-aloud time), even small amounts of time do add up. The summer after my son’s first grade year, he was supposed to read “at least ten minutes” a day. He interpreted this to mean “no more than ten minutes” day (remember, this is the fidgety kid who doesn’t like to sit still). So I made sure he read (aloud, to me) for exactly ten minutes a day, six days a week. I chose the books, all picture books, mostly older but some new ones; and, to make it more interesting, I chose the books by author’s last name, trying to make them come out even among the letters of the alphabet. By the end of the summer he had read 72 books, three for every letter of the alphabet except for Q and X (yes, by the end of August I was scouring the shelves of all the local libraries for children’s picture books of appropriate difficulty and length written by authors whose last names began with I and U). And of course his reading was much more fluent, and he was truly ready for second grade.The bottom line? Kids are more likely to love books and reading if their parents do, whether in the summer or at any other time.
ex_ag - May 17, 2010 at 8:00 am
Mark Bauerlin justifies his arguments for more reading time/school-oriented activities by saying that the “kids [who] are too controlled by parents and schools [...] make up a tiny portion of the teen population.”So, this means that these well-educated kids have to suffer for the deficiences of their peers (or their peers’ parents)?All of this smacks of a lowest-common-denominator approach to education. Let’s not try to make exceptional students; let’s just make sure they’re all blandly (and barely) educated together.Bauerlin and I have already had this debate about excessive homework and/or school authority in our kids’ lives. And I still insist that kids need time to develop as individuals and to learn other things (arts, maybe?) that school curricula omit or undervalue. So, I’ll say again: I’m not interested in raising an “excellent drone” for my society. (BTW, note the “Star Trek” reference I picked up from a summer movie? Not schoolwork, not a book, but quite useful to my cultural literacy).Perhaps a radical approach to teaching teens would be to cater to those who actually WANT to be there instead of making the experience so miserable and totalitarian that NO ONE really wants to be there?Perhaps, if we’re so concerned about our waning “American exceptionalism,” we should encourage exceptional qualities in our kids instead of punching them out with a cookie cutter?
lexalexander - May 17, 2010 at 9:35 am
Your kids can spend the summer making homemade ale? They let you DO that? Oh, I am SO pulling my kids out of camp.
markbauerlein - May 17, 2010 at 11:06 am
Indeed, Luther, Townsend’s opening licks on “Eminence Front” are good, good stuff.And mk is right about length of listening time. A long-ish plot and sustained, linear action is excellent brain exercise. The only reason I downplay picture books is because of all the pictures kids see on screen. More and more we must understand book reading in adversarial terms.ex_ag, I think you make a fundamental mistake when you regard reading time and homework time as antithetical to “individual development.” The traditionalist position (as opposed to the progressivist position) is that the materials of history, literature, philosophy, science, civics, and the arts are crucial ingredients for individuation, and better than the materials of a youth’s media exposure and peer pressure.
ex_ag - May 17, 2010 at 11:34 am
Ah, yes, “history, literature, science, civics”–look to states like Texas to see how all of these are bent toward “individuation.” You are making the “fundamental mistake” of assuming that these subjects are, in high schools and elementary classrooms, delivered in the same manner as they are at a university. (And you’ll notice, I left “arts” and “philosophy” out of the equation to more accurately reflect a typical school environment).And don’t feel too superior about your own school district; the only difference between it and Texas is that your local district is probably a bit more subtle.
markbauerlein - May 17, 2010 at 12:01 pm
I think I trust individual teachers of those subjects more than you do, ex_ag, although I agree that the “accountability” demands on teachers often squelches variation and experimentation in classrooms. I don’t understand, however, what the Texas situation has to do with this issue. And perhaps you know something about the Dekalb School district that I don’t–and should, since my son will enter it pretty soon.
willynilly - May 17, 2010 at 12:39 pm
There has been some modest improvement in Bauerlein’s work over the past two weeks. At least he didn’t blame moderate republicans or democrats for the decline in summer reading among school-age children – a common practice of his in the past. But readers, don’t let your guard down; soon Bauerlein will be back with his sneaky, sublimal presentations on how his extreme right wing buddies are the intelligentcia of the US and need to be elected to every position that appears on any ballot, anywhere – `a la the Karl Rove credo.