Summer is a time to relax and have fun, but if you’re in UNIS, it is also a time when you get your summer reading list from the English Department.

Typically, students from M1-T3 receive a piece of paper during the last few days of school with a list of three books. These students are required to purchase and read at least one book from the list over the break upon entering the next grade level. When the next academic year begins, students are expected to bring the one or more books they have read to school and have a fair amount of knowledge of the plot, for they are told that the teachers will be quizzing them, assigning relevant projects, or conducting class discussions during the first couple of days of the English class.

One growing complaint among students is that the different English teachers prioritize the work about the summer reading differently. Some teachers don’t even bring up the topic of summer reading in class for the entire school year. Many students have noticed that as they enter higher grades, the teachers spend less class time on the summer reading or no class time at all; consequently, these students become very frustrated. “I vividly recall that in M1, our English class analyzed the summer reading – a novel called So B. But in T1, I read a novel called To Kill a Mockingbird, which sat in my locker for the entire year,” said Grace Li, a T3 student.

These varying priority levels could be attributed to the fact that there might not be ample time for discussing summer reading at the expense of the already-tight class schedule. If this is indeed the case, many students agree that we should no longer be required to read any books on the list because there is no adequate follow-up to enable them to fully digest the content and the meaning of the books. However, the potential drawbacks of taking out the required summer reading might negatively impact the reading capacity of UNIS students.

Perhaps, a better solution might be a combination of the following two measures: find a way to integrate the reading into the curriculum and not require students entering higher grades to do the summer reading.