IMAGINE Magazine Question for 7/15 - "Your Summer Reading List"

[JeffsFort]

For many students, the final days of school were filled with dreams of sleeping in, riding bikes, hanging out with friends, and enjoying a glorious couple of months without homework. Then, just as freedom seemed within reach, a teacher would hand out the dreaded Summer Reading List. Suddenly, your carefully planned schedule of doing absolutely nothing had to compete with a list of books and the promise that a report would be ready to be turned in when school resumed. Some students actually enjoyed finding a good book and spending part of their summer reading it. Others selected the shortest title available, read just enough to survive the assignment, typically with only a week or less left before summer vacation ended or, rushing through it the day after school let out and spending the rest of the summer pretending the whole thing never happened.

Of course, there were always the brave souls who attempted to avoid the assignment entirely. Maybe you claimed your dog ate the book, even though the dog had never shown the slightest interest in literature ::grin:: Perhaps you insisted that a mysterious sprinkler accident had transformed your report into papier-mâché, or that an unexpected encounter with a rogue beach wave had tragically carried your notes out to sea. No matter how clever the excuse seemed at the time, teachers always appeared to possess some sort of supernatural ability to see right through it.

So this month's question is: when summer vacation arrived and the Summer Reading List appeared, were you the eager reader, the bare-minimum survivor, or the master excuse-maker who tried to escape the assignment altogether? 💜

[Page Scrawler]

Fortunately, I never had a reading list assigned from school. They only get kids interested in reading long enough to pull a bait-and-switch and suck all of the joy out of it.

Instead, I spent my time reading independently. Alex Sanchez and Brent Hartinger were big on my list. I also enjoyed reading Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

A book that I wish had been published earlier, though, is The Island of Beyond, by Elizabeth Atkinson, which I think I've mentioned before. I always make a point to read it at least once during the summer.

[JeffsFort]

One summer, I decided I could get out of doing my summer reading project by claiming I had lost my library card.

Back then, a library card was a manila card with a little metal identification plate embedded in it, so I figured losing it sounded serious and permanent. My story was that the librarian would not let me borrow anything without it, which meant I had been completely unable to get any of the books on the reading list.

I practiced the excuse until I sounded genuinely disappointed.

On the first day of school, I explained the whole unfortunate situation to my teacher. She listened patiently and then asked, “Why didn’t you have them look up your name and make you a replacement card?”

I had not prepared for that.

She explained that replacing a lost card cost about fifty cents and only took a few minutes. She knew this because she had tried the exact same excuse when she was a kid. Her own teacher had seen through it immediately and sent her back to the library with whatever the replacement fee was back then.

Then my teacher reached into her desk, placed two quarters in front of me, and said, “I believe the library is still open after school.”

That was when I learned teachers were once kids too—and they have had years to improve the traps their teachers used on them. LOL!