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You’ve studied, stressed, worked hard at your extracurriculars and woken up at a ridiculously early hour each and every morning for the past nine months. Studying for that very last stretch of exams felt nearly impossible. When you were waiting for that final bell to ring, it may have felt like you were waiting for paint to dry, but it’s finally here: it’s summer.
After the school year you’ve had, chances are the last thing you want to be thinking about is doing more reading. There is no sense in denying that some summer reading assignments might not be the most compelling, but with the right attitude, summer books can probably function as more than just a pillow for you to rest your head on as you relax on the beach. This post will offer some helpful advice to conquer those summer reading lists and start school in the fall feeling both rejuvenated and prepared.
Summer reading generally consists of books and reading assignments to be completed over the summer prior to taking a certain course. These readings might be assigned school-wide, or they might be up to the discretion of a specific teacher. Summer reading is commonly assigned as a component of summer work for AP courses, but it might also be assigned for honors or other parallel courses.
Every assignment will differ based on your school and what classes you are taking. You might be assigned to read parts of a book, or you may just be told to read the entire thing. Some colleges even assign summer reading prior to freshman year! Columbia, for example, has students read a portion of Homer’s The Iliad.
As was mentioned before, while some summer reading might be dull, it’s more than just something to help put you to sleep on a muggy July evening. Summer reading can help you prepare for the courses you are about to take in the fall—while it might take weeks or even months to read a book altogether as a class, assigning students a book to read over the summer allows you to jump right into assignments and class discussion once school starts.
Summer reading can also help keep you sharp and up to speed in terms of reading comprehension during the long summer months. If you’ve ever walked into a math class on the first day of a school year and noticed that doing simple multiplication felt about as confusing as trying to solve a puzzle while blindfolded, then you probably know that summer learning loss is no mere myth. While it’s most commonly discussed in the context of mathematics and other more quantitative subjects, it affects students’ reading comprehension levels as well—and completing reading assignments during the summer is a great way to combat this.
Tackling a summer reading assignment is also a great way to prepare for college-level courses! Depending on which college you decide to attend and what you decide to major in, you might be assigned hundreds of pages of reading in a week for just one course. Learning how to break up your readings and retain the information in them will no doubt be great practice for your college years.
This one should be a no-brainer, but not all summer reading assignments are tortuous. Some courses and teachers will actually assign books that are very compelling, depending on what you’re interested in. If you happen to be an avid reader, then you might just look at summer reading as a means to finally check out that novel that you’ve been meaning to delve into for a while now.
It may help to try to connect the readings to your interests — if you’re a future STEM major and all of your summer readings are about neuroscience, then this will probably be easy for you. If you’re an arts/humanities major reading about phosphorescent jellyfish, however, this might be a little more difficult. Try to draw in connections to your interests as much as you can, even if they’re tangential. You might be surprised at how much you learn, and how much different disciples can connect with one another!