Stevie Klein ’12
News Editor

As school comes to a close, summer feels never-ending, the next year hazy and distant. But June ends, July races by, and suddenly it’s August, and you spot in the corner of your room, hidden beneath your flip-flops and beach towel, your summer work. You plan out the rest of your summer, this book next week, the textbook reading the week after, but somehow the weeks go too quickly, and the deadline is two weeks away.

My summer work includes reading three books, an essay, textbook reading and a math packet. Yes, these are all for AP classes, but the excessive amount of work has me questioning teachers’ motives. 


Since the point of AP classes is supposed to be to mimic college courses, why then, do college students receive no summer work, or maybe a single book at most? As I read about the American Revolution, I watch my sister, a rising sophmore in college, float in the pool, chatting away with her friends about how relaxed she is. 


Maybe the motive is to teach us a full unit. We learn the inforamtion on our own by reading a few books and then teacher’s can extend their summer a few more months because they have less to teach us once the school year begins.

Maybe it’s because there is too much information to fit into a year— but if the information cannot fit into the designated school year, maybe the curriculum should be shortened. 


Then there is the last option: to weed out the students that just don’t belong in the class. This seems to be excessively true, as teachers scare students with a heavy workload come September. 


A common facebook wall post I have seen is, “Ugh I don’t feel like doing the summer work I’m just gonna drop it.” Only to be replied with, “Please I haven’t started either, don’t drop it! I need you in that class.” 


Laziness to do summer work helps eliminate the students who signed up for the class just to say they were taking an AP or honors class.

If a student cannot handle the summer work, chances are that they cannot handle the rest of the year, even if their brains become functional by that time. I hold the belief that this is the main reason for summer work.

Even if I believe summer work to be useless, I always try my best at it because somewhere, beneath my thoughts about vacation and tanning, is the want to start the school year off with a bang, making me actually sit down and try to focus for more than 10 minutes at a time.