As the summer drew to a close, it was not uncommon to find students indoors, hunched over novels or math textbooks. Even during the calm of summer, the idea of summer work loomed overhead.
Various departments assign work over the summer, ranging from Honors English novels to math summer skills sets or AP Chemistry problems.
“It got me back into the school groove,” freshman Honors Geometry student Jeffrey Eidelman said.
Easing students back into study habits is one of the reasons behind the summer assignments.”It was beneficial because we don’t have to waste a month of class time reviewing,” freshman Michael Rembold said.
English teacher Mr. Jason Lovera finds this aspect of summer work helpful, especially in his AP English class.
“We want to hit the ground running, so to speak, because we have a lot of information to cover,” Lovera said.
In AP English, one of the summer assignments is to read a novel for a year-long research paper.
“It doesn’t put students in the best position for success if they’re reading their research paper novel while they’re reading other assigned novels,” Lovera said. “Re-reading the work [for later assignments] also forces students to rethink critical passages. That’s when I see students understand the text on a deeper level.”
AP English student senior Emily Schnaare read her research paper novel in about two weeks over the summer. She believes that since the texts are a substantial part of the curriculum and must be covered, reading them over the summer is a good choice.
“If we could omit the texts altogether, though, yeah, we’d want to get rid of it,” Schnaare said.
In other AP classes, the process of summer assignments is very much the same.
“We don’t have time to go over it in class because there’s so much on the AP, so I guess it’s good that we can do the easy stuff by ourselves and the hard stuff in class,” junior Kate Hogan, an AP Chemistry student, said.
Hogan said that although the summer assignments were helpful, they did add stress to the summer that is supposed to act as a sort of break for students.
“Over the summer we had to do five chapters of summer work, about 100 questions per chapter. This also involved questions and vocab for all the sections,” Hogan said. “We had online work due by certain dates throughout the summer.”
In Honors Geometry, as in many other math classes, there is a summer skills set followed by a test over the material. Despite the helpfulness of easing students back into school, Eidelman said he does find some flaws in the system.
“The work wasn’t difficult, but the test was. The summer packet was very different than the test,” Eidelman said.
Although student views differ, teachers agree that the main goal of summer assignments is to benefit the students.
“It really is intended to reduce stress during the school year. I know students don’t always see it that way, but it is my intention,” Lovera said.