This year the English Department finally decided to recognize the continuous concern about summer reading. Year after year students have been complaining about the amount of work they have to do, and year after year they decide not to do it at all. As a result of this, the English teachers, sick of rarely seeing completed summer reading work, decided to take action and make a change, hoping to get more students to participate. 

In the past, students in honors and college prep classes were instructed to read either one or two books, depending on level, and the possibility of short stories on top of that. Students would then have to answer four connection/reflection prompts for each book. This overall took a lot of time away from students who want to spend summer not even thinking about school, and especially not spending hours on reading and writing about books they don’t even personally enjoy or resonate with. 

All students, exempting Advanced Placement, will now only be required to read one book over the summer. Not only that, but the options for what this book can be has increased significantly with long lists provided for all students. To really put the cherry on top of all these improvements, if a student does not find a book on the list that they think they would enjoy, they can contact administration by July 1st to discuss the opportunity to read something that was not one of the given options. 

Now, it gets even better. The previous four question connections assignments will not have to be completed. Instead, during homeroom when school resumes, students will complete a short reflection on the book they read. This reflection will be the only thing required to be submitted to their assigned English teacher, meaning no written work needs to be done over the summer. 

The only catch to these improvements and alterations is that students will now have to complete their reading over the summer. That might seem obvious, but in previous years summer reading was not completed until January or possibly later for students who did not have English until the second semester. 

At Haverford it is clear that the teachers really do hear their students and want them to succeed. The change of these summer reading requirements were done with the students in mind. In addition, the teachers want to not only actually receive the work they assign, but they also want their students to get the benefits of reading. English 10 teacher Michael Jones said, “the English department has been advocating for changing summer reading for years, and we finally took our first step.” With that, hopefully, there are more improvements yet to come.

Find out more about the summer reading expectations and book lists here.