Warm weather, bright sun, swimming and water skiing: summer is a time when students tend to forget about the previous school year and worry about no homework assignments, tests and quizzes. The workload took a toll on students, so a break is necessary during the summer. Honors English -and for the first time, History- students, however, will not get that break due to required summer reading. Whether they have no time during the summer because they’re working, or having time but just needing the mental break, students don’t want to deal with the stress level of reading and taking notes for the upcoming school year and shouldn’t have to do summer reading.

For many students, the amount of time that they anticipate having shrinks as the season becomes busier than they thought. “Realizing now, I have so much activities this summer, that I don’t have anytime to focus on this little summer reading,” said Rebecca Netz, explaining the difficult situation of juggling multiple tasks, such as soccer, link crew, Ireland, and marching band, over this coming summer. Even students who have time to work on their assignments believe they deserve a wonderful break with no stress: sophomore Alexandra Wagner says that since school is done for the summer, “I have all the time in the world now, but I don’t understand why we need an assignment just to practice and get ready for the following year.”

Another reason that summer reading should not be required is the question of, “why?” Why do we have to suffer through reading a book when were not going to do anything with it during school? Once the year starts, teachers go over the summer reading quickly, if at all, spending much less time going over the text than students spent reading it. Freshman Kaia Dolph explains what learning this reality was like: “For being my first year doing the summer reading, I went into class the first day and we didn’t even do anything over our book, and weeks passed by and still didn’t do anything.” If teachers can’t even make it a priority, students shouldn’t have to, either.