Summer Reading

 It’s over.

Labor Day Weekend, the unofficial end of summer, has come and gone.

For most of my life, Labor Day weekend meant periodically checking in on the Jerry Lewis Telethon. It was always exciting to watch the frantic finish, waiting for the heavy hitters like Sammy Davis, Jr. or Wayne Newton to make a final appearance and push that tote board closer to “one dollar more” and that final turn which cued the release of the balloons and confetti followed by Jerry singing You’ll Never Walk Alone. I’m not crying. You’re crying.

Alas, the Jerry Lewis Telethon is long gone, as is Jerry, and also marathon fund-raising events, replaced by viral online challenges and daily e-mail appeals.

Labor Day also meant that summer vacation had come to an end, the beginning of the new school year was just two days away, and a frantic flourish to finish to the summer reading list.

The school year around here begins in August now. I’m not sure why. One of my irrational fears is that it’s to make up for the time lost to state testing. Gosh, I hope that’s not my legacy. I don’t lose any sleep at night over any of the other atrocities (real, imagined, or fabricated) attributed to large-scale, standardized testing, in general, and state testing, in particular. But being even a small part of the reason why the school year now starts before Labor Day – say it ain’t so!

Before I go on, let’s not confuse the gentle touch of summer reading lists full of choices and worlds to explore with the heavy hand of complicated, soul-crushing mandatory summer reading assignments that are the inevitable, but hopefully rare, result of combining a good idea like summer reading and bureaucracy. FUBAR. (I shudder to think about what the well-intentioned but ill-prepared are going to do to universal free lunch.)

Summer reading lists were about building good habits, walking to the neighborhood branch of the public library to search for the next book to read, generalization (i.e., applying skills learned in school in a new setting), as well as maintaining and expanding those skills. Summer reading lists and monthly book reports, which were their school-year counterpart, were all about student agency.

After first grade, summer reading was sitting on the front steps after supper with my Mom or Dad and reading a daily story from 365 Bedtime Stories – the mid-1960s edition of Whitman Publishing’s collection of one-page life lessons. Later it was sitting on the beach in South Boston reading books like Alistair MacLean’s Where Eagles Dare.

Personally, I gravitated toward biographies and historical fiction. Those were my go to genres. There were books like A Day No Pigs Would Die and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, which I probably never would have picked up otherwise. Through the summer reading lists I discovered science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and eventually made it home to the satire and dark humor of Kurt Vonnegut.

So much has changed since I completed my last reading list in the Bicentennial summer of 1976. Through it all, however, summer reading lists and summer reading live on. And that’s a good thing.

Summer 2023

I had no reading list this summer, but I did have a small pile of books that had accumulated on the corner of my desk and titles hastily scratched on a notepad while listening to Hidden Brain.

I began the summer with 2013 The Great British Bake Off finalist Ruby Tandoh’s latest book, Cook As You Are. In the introduction, Tandoh offers these words of wisdom:

We try to cook ourselves better somehow…instead of meeting our hungers here and now, as we are. Sometimes these aspirations can push us outside our comfort zones and lead us towards new experiences. But much of the time, we’re so stuck in striving that we lose sight of the good stuff already right here in front of us; the way onions cook in butter, the fun of a corner-store snack haul, the guidance of our own gut feelings.

Of course, reading Ruby’s book led me on summer day trips to her 2022 essay Eating is Storytelling and her 2016 restaurant review of McDonalds; and her daily Instagram updates had me on pins and needles awaiting the release of her thoroughly-researched guide to the ice cream scene in and around London – even though I have never been to London and don’t see a trip there in my immediate future.

Sticking with the theme of being stuck, next up was a book from my Hidden Brain list – Adam Alter’s Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to get unstuck when it matters most. As he says at the outset, getting stuck is inevitable. Getting unstuck is the challenge, and it was his discussion of challenges v. threats that stuck with me: “You can rise to a challenge, where you might succumb to a threat.” While some situations are, in fact, immediate threats, many other perceived threats can be reframed as challenges “that can be attempted again tomorrow, if they aren’t conquered today.” Advice that I can apply to several aspects of my personal life; and also has me thinking about things like the deficit mindset, stereotype threat, and how we are framing concepts like learning loss, opportunity-to-learn, gender, race, and systemic racism in the here and now.

One of the reasons that books and notes pile up on my desk is that my attention is easily redirected. The release of Leslie Van Houten this summer led to my rewatching of a couple of episodes of Aquarius on Netflix late one night which ultimately led me back to my old copy of Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi’s account of the Tate-Bianca murders and the Manson trial.

Helter Skelter led me down the rabbit hole of a host of other articles and books, listening to the White Album for the first time in many, many years (vinyl, of course), and finally finishing Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. I turned it off about three-fourths of the way through the first time I watched it a couple of years ago because, as I thought at the time, I know how this story ends and I don’t need to see that for Sharon Tate or Margot Robbie. My bad.

Aside from the actual story, there were two things I took away from Helter Skelter this summer.

One was the number of incredible events that happened in a one-month stretch during that summer of 1969: Chappaquiddick, the Apollo 11 moon landing (and subsequent nationwide celebrations when the astronauts were released from quarantine), the Tate-LaBianca murders, and Woodstock – all between July 18 and August 18. Information overload. How did one process all of that happening in real-time? How do we do it now when every little thing with a video attached to it is over-hyped and becomes national news?

The second was a response from a decidedly less than expert witness when Bugliosi asked him why he considered himself an expert on LSD when he had conducted no research of his own, and had published no papers:

“What is an expert but what the beholder thinks he is from his experience? Many people consider me an expert, so I have accustomed myself to assuming that I am.”

That quote triggered too many troubling memories of the ever-increasing number of “experts” I encountered in state testing over the years and also long overdue acceptance of the level of discomfort I should have felt each time the mantle of psychometrician, educational researcher, assessment specialist, or technical expert was placed upon my shoulders.

I will be wrapping up my summer reading with Michael Russell’s new book, Systemic Racism and Educational Measurement: Confronting injustice in testing, assessment, and beyond, which arrived in my mailbox just last Friday. I had the privilege of reading an early draft of the first section of the book and it raised some lingering questions in my mind about social constructs and how those of us in educational assessment and accountability are supposed to interact with them. I am looking forward to sharpening those thoughts as I read the finished product and expect to have a blog post on the topic later this fall.

Mike’s book should be an appropriate follow-up to the book I am currently reading, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science, the 2007 memoir written by Nobel Prize-winning, scientist, James D. Watson – no stranger to controversy surrounding statements and views related to race, intelligence, testing, and educational measurement.  I am not yet deep enough into the book to know whether I am supposed to avoid people who bore me or avoid boring other people. Likely both.

I have dedicated a good part of my life to the former – not an easy task.

And in an attempt to avoid the latter (knowing full well that it’s probably too late), I will end this post right here.

Image by Lubov Lisitsa from Pixabay