Summer readings...

[kid908]

Do you guys get them? I get them...Mine's dued tomorrow or the day after and currently doing it right now. Just wondering if you guys have to do this bullshit.

[Ganon]

In elementary school, sure.

[Heathen]

have them but never read them.

[NuggetWarmer]

Finished already, took a test. Only one who read a book. :(

[ChemicalFizz]

I feel you. Do you feel me? It's for AP US Government and Politics: "Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan." It is so full of political jargon that I'm questioning my ability to read books.

If any of you have read it before, feel free to help

[jcap]

Didn't have them from K-3. After I moved, from 4-12 I had a summer reading assignment every summer. I never once actually read a single book, but it was good bullshitting practice.

[ultama121]

Yes. I was a assigned two. Some years I'm assigned three, so I guess I got lucky. Still sucks though.

"Oh hey, enjoy your summer-- oh yeah, read these books you have no interest in, you'll have a test the day you get back. I heard you liked interesting stories, so we gave you some of the most "diverse" (read: Unrelatable and mundane) stories we could find. Another two stories about Southern folk and native tribes. :D Oh also, be sure to annotate the entire fucking book, because over analysis is better than God! We'll definitely check if you did so for points btw. K cya!"

Little did we know that our teacher didn't give a shit whether or not we annotated the books. On a side note, one of the books "The Bean Trees" was actually pretty good, not exactly my cuppa tea, but still good. The other one "Things Fall Apart" was quite uguu.

[Bodzilla]

All english department assigned books are horrible. hth.


thats why my teacher used to give out bonus's and a reward system for reading what ever you liked, the more complex and longer the book, the more rewards you got, and hey they where atleast good books because YOU CHOOSE THEM.

[Xetsuei]

Yep, this year was To Kill A Mockingbird, last year was Fahrenheit 451.

Gotta read the book and then do a 600-1000 word report based on my choice of a selection of prompts.

[NuggetWarmer]

I read Fahrenheit 451 this year.

[Timo]

Gotta read the book and then do a 600-1000 page report

wat

So when you're in between grades at school (summer holidays?), you have to read something before you get back for your first day? Or is summer break for you guys a semester break.

[jcap]

The problem with schools stepping outside of their jurisdiction is a huge problem in the US. Unfortunately, the retard judges think that schools should have authority outside of school hours and off of school property. The problems related to this are the ones you hear in the news, such as when a student calls another kid on the Internet a faggot, and then the school suspends the offending student. However, the same concept of "authority" also applies with summer reading programs, which they mandate despite having absolutely no real right to do so.

Maybe if the program was adjusted to be more like "we'll be discussing this book for a month when school begins, so you can read the book over the summer and read at your own pace, or you can read it in two weeks after school begins PLUS your other homework" rather than what is currently "read the book and write two 5 page reports on it and turn it in two days after school starts or else you won't pass the first marking period," I wouldn't be so critical about it.

Supporters summer reading programs advocate that these programs improve reading skills and help educate. Too bad that's only true in a perfect world. The reality of it is that students are happy to just get the assignment over as quick as possible, and to just get a decent grade for the assignment. From the beginning, all we thought about was "hmmm, if I get a C on this, I should be able to pull off about a 92 or so for the marking period if I study well for everything else." Well, gambling like this is what throws off those "perfect world" results. The truth is that students will cut corners whenever and wherever possible. I might not even open up the cover of the damn book, but rather just go on Sparknotes and read a summary of the story. If I need to focus on a specific area, then I just read the summary of that one chapter. The only time I might need the book is to search for a quote, just to make it appear that I actually read it.

The only thing they are encouraging here is bullshitting assignments, which I guess they would see as a negative since you are cheating the assignment. No one does the assignment as intended, so no one is getting the "benefit" of the program. The way I look at it is that if someone is going to actually do the reading, they already enjoy it and probably read several books in their free time anyway. They're not benefiting those who already read, and they're not benefiting those who don't want to. The worst part is that there isn't even any discussion of the books (other than maybe one day), so it isn't even close to being comparable to reading a book for the actual class, where there's discussion, activities, and assignments surrounding different aspects of the book.

At least last year my town's high school district did something right for the first time in their entire summer reading program. Instead of reading two books and writing reports, they actually did what I first mentioned as an alternative. They assigned a short book - The Last Lecture - and this year they are going to be using it in English class as a guide to live by. Too bad it comes too late for me. :|

[Cojafoji]

Fahrenheit 451.
Fantastic book.

[Corndogman]

Yeah, usually we have to read a book off a list of about 10, and do some kind of essay or stupid poster. This year was different though, as we just had to take a test the second day of class. This made it easier to read the sparknotes instead of reading the book.

[teh lag]

We've actually used our summer reading books in school the past two years which has raised my opinion of it. We always used to read books about Troubled Teens with Troubled Pasts trying to make their way and find a Sense of Identity in a Confusing World. Before that, we read Touching Stories about Underprivileged People and did next to nothing with them.

This year we also got to read some actual legitimate books, instead of the regular aforementioned "welp lets cram some diversity in em." I can't say I really liked The Trial, The Stranger, or Beowulf, but at least my mind is at ease knowing they're not just pulling stuff out of their ass (Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilyich were also on the list) and that we'll actually be doing stuff with it (we're reading Grendel later this year and comparing it with Beowulf or some shit like that).

[Donut]

600-1000 page report
:raise: they expect you to print this out, and they expect your teacher to read like 150 of them? do you go to school in nazi germany?

[paladin]

He meant word.

[Xetsuei]

He meant word.

Whoops!

Yeah, he's right, I meant word.

[Terry]

I think encouraging people to read is a bad idea.

[Mass]

Had to read Frankenstein and Pygmalion and write a three pager comparing them.

easy once I got a thesis and quotations

Didn't have time to read them when I actually learned I had to, which is too bad because they're not bad pieces of literature at all from what I did read, online summaries and the important parts I knew about from the summaries.

I think our entire educational philosophy is sub-optimal, homework is compensation for the inefficiencies, which is too bad because the best way to sabotage learning is to make it uninteresting and tedious.

[UnevenElefant5]

We've read Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird and I would have had to read the Count of Montie Cristo and Edith Hamilton's "Mythology" this last summer if I hadn't dropped out of english honors.

[UrKungFuSux]

Had to read Great Gatsby, Things They Carried, Death of a Salesman, and The Kitchen God's Wife. +40 page "Intellectual" journal. Journal was an easy 100 points though.
Had to read A People's History of the United States for APUSH + a historical project about Roe v. Wade.

[paladin]

The new drawing on the right side of the brain
Betty Edwards
ISBN: 9780874774245

The new drawing on the right side of the brain workbook
Betty Edwards
ISBN: 9781585421954

Living with art, 8th edition
Mark Getlein
ISBN: 9780073190761

Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides
ISBN: 9780312427733

The writer’s journey, 3rd ed
Christopher Vogler
ISBN: 9781932907360

Plus 2 Sketch books with 800 sketches, each

Youd think its summer school, but noooooooo

[Bodzilla]

also hot tip for english class,



do it stoned.
all my stoner class mates Aced english and when they laid off the drugs in an effort to put more constructive thought into it to achieve better results.... they're marks actually dropped.
English as a class is about telling the people that are reading it, exactly what they want to hear.
its an ego stroke, nothing more.

[Xetsuei]

also hot tip for english class,



do it stoned.
all my stoner class mates Aced english and when they laid off the drugs in an effort to put more constructive thought into it to achieve better results.... they're marks actually dropped.
English as a class is about telling the people that are reading it, exactly what they want to hear.
its an ego stroke, nothing more.

Oh you:mech2:

[TVTyrant]

Pssh English. Seriously, I go to work on that class.

[Bodzilla]

Oh you:mech2:

not me xet :botman:

[n00b1n8R]

English as a class is about telling the people that are reading it, exactly what they want to hear.
its an ego stroke, nothing more.
A thousand times this.

Once I stopped trying to produce what I considered quality and simply jerked the teacher off filling all the tickboxes (producing mediocre shit IMO) my marks went through the roof.

[legionaire45]

My 11th/12th grade teacher was actually fun because she spent the time being critical of the works and actually teaching us to think for ourselves. Yeah, we spent a lot of time doing the normal english crap like 5 paragraph essays and doing all the various ways of citing sources and crap, but at least she made it somewhat interesting.

She also co-owns a basketball team (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LA_Sparks), but I digress.

From 11th to 12th grade we were given a rather large math packet to do (I don't remember the exact length but I know it was over 50 pages and probably closer to 80). Our math teacher was crazy, but hey, at least I know all the content that has been taught in the first two days of Calc :D.

[Arteen]

I hated all my English classes. Hardly any of it involved teaching us how to write well, despite all the writing assignments. What a waste of time.

[cheezdue]

I had to read two books for my summer and annotate character developments, plots, ect.

I could'nt stand reading Man's Search for Meaning. Read the first 20 pages, then it met my cabinet of forgetten stuff.

Brave New World was a great book, I just didn't annotate.

So I guess I failed my first 6 weeks of school.

[kid908]

Well, I turned in my summer reading yesterday. I can honestly say you only need to read about 1-2 pages prior and after the quote you're going to use and that will give you basicly all the information you needed.

My assignment was to "read the book," find a quote from the passage, pick a question from the list to answer (the passage has to relate to the question), and write a 150 word essay of what is going on and how the quote relates to it, then after that, you write 100 words describing your "opinion" about it. Repeat until you have a total of 3 (750 words totally for the minimum).

I also don't like the word minimum they give. When I write an essay without a word minimum, I usually end up with a 2-5 page single spaced essay. When they give you a minimum, I only do the bare minimum.

I bullshitted it like everyone else. I only believe one person in my class that actually did this correctly. and about 1/3 of them just gave up and didn't do it.

I really don't see the beneficial factors for these assignment. Maybe we should come up with a well written essay showing our true intellect as a community (for those who have to do it) and give it to our english teachers to just fuck with them. I see no benefit for this and I'm sure the teachers get tired of reading all these bullcrapped essays, why even give it out? 1. It more work for everyone. 2. It's time consuming.. 3. Mostly nobody does it correctly. 4. If I was the teacher, I would be pissed to be sitting there reading ~50 students' bs papers.

Lets put this into perspective, My PHYSICS teacher doesn't even go through and check all the paper for correct answers. All he had to read were short little equations (let along reading 3 bs essay per student in a grading period of time). What he did was grade until he found a good enough example of the correct answers, xerox it, and just give everyone a completion grade for doing all the problems. He then proceed to hand us back our paper and the xerox for the correct answers and make us grade ourselves and correct wrong answers.