Tagged: summer reading

Kevin Smokler is setting out to resurrect America’s long-ago encounters. Works such as The Great Gatsby, Fahrenheit 451 and Bartleby: The Scrivener, skimmed and discarded by 15 year-old high school hands in days of yore, are being taken off the shelf, dusted off, and re-explored by the same pair of older, more experienced eyes. By compiling a list of fifty high school “classics”, Kevin spent ten months re-reading the stories that have become distant, unquestionable deities in the eyes of many middle-aged Americans. What he found was profound; and in some ways, unexpected. Kevin, now 39, amassed his thoughts and findings in his new book Practical Classics: Fifty Reasons to Reread Fifty Books You Haven’t Touched Since High School.

This week NHPR is taking a look at the impacts of summer learning loss: the things that students forget during summer vacation. Yesterday we heard about how this hits low-income students harder than others, and today we look at what schools and parents are doing to tackle learning loss.

In just a few short weeks, summer vacation will come to a close, and when it does teachers will start the school year off with a familiar routine: review.

It may sound like no big deal, but over the summer students forget so much of their schooling over vacation that it’s come to be called “summer learning loss.” In the first of a three part series about the summer slide, NHPR’s Sam Evans-Brown tells us why summer activities have a lot to do with how students fare during the rest of the year.