Students Prepare for Summer Assignments

You feel a rush of relief. Months of studying have finally led to your last final. For weeks you have pushed yourself, aiming for fives on your Advanced Placement (AP) exams and a high GPA. As school comes to an end, you start planning your summer: vacation, hangouts, and how to make the most of your summer break. Then it hits – summer work. Summer work is meant to provide students with the foundation for the next academic year and allows them to avoid what is called the "summer slump.” This slump is a decline in academic skills and knowledge retention that occurs when a student does not stimulate the brain over the break. When it comes to these assignments, many students often overlook the amount of time they take and the planning that comes with it. Not all summer work is the same; it ranges from light summer reading to a heavy AP workload. For freshmen and sophomores, their summer work consists of reading two books and preparing for a discussion at the start of the school year.

However, AP courses demand much more work. For example, AP World assigns notes and worksheets for 100 pages of a textbook, while AP Language and Composition asks students to read three books and write three essays. Summer work is extremely easy to procrastinate. With no immediate deadlines and plenty of distractions, it is easy to push off assignments to the next day. As a result, the majority of students complete their assignments a few weeks before the start of the school year. The consequences of this can lead to a rough transition, increased stress, rushed work, and an incomplete understanding for the course.

Kush Aggarwal, a sophomore at the high school, is taking five AP classes next year: AP Calculus BC, AP Lang, AP Physics C: Mechanics, AP United States History, and AP Spanish. When asked if he had a plan for summer work he responded, “I am planning to complete the work within August so that I don’t forget what I practice before next school year. For some assignments, if they require more work or have more parts, I may start in late July to make sure I have time to finish them.” This balance of both studies and having time to spend enjoying summer is crucial. One piece of advice he would share about summer work is to “finish things that won’t take long” sooner. This way, students can “have more time later on in case [they] get assigned a long project or many small assignments that take up a large portion of their time.” Trying to manage your time is an important skill of doing the summer work; it allows you to spend time with your friends while completing work to prepare you for next year. Summer work gives you the freedom to complete it in your own time and still enjoy your summer.