Whether you loved or hated them, they were almost always there...a nagging reminder while you were in the pool playing Marco Polo, cracking the bat in a pick up game of baseball, and licking up all the ice cream before it melted that idyllic summer couldn't last forever.
Over the last ten years, my assignments have become that reminder for hundreds of students. There is plenty of controversy, as always, concerning summer reading, because, well, because anything involving education is fraught with contention. Some people say that the reading is a way to stop a malleable mind from regressing over the two month break, it is a necessary benchmark assessment. Other's argue that it is unfair to assess a student on something that lacked direct instruction, that summer is family time, and as I have too often heard, children simply do not have time to read a book over the summer. They were on vacation.
Wherever you stand on the issue, summer reading exists.
