For nine months of the year, students face essays, tests, and meetings. As summer approaches, preparations begin for the beach, camp, and…summer readings. Summer is typically thought of as vacation, a period without school, yet books are assigned. So, is there any reason that these books were chosen, and do students see it the same way as teachers?
Dr. Erika Jo Brown, 11th-grade English teacher, offered a teacher’s perspective. She began by providing an answer to the eternal question among students: why were these books chosen?
Dr. Brown’s reasoning for assigning THE NIGHT WATCHMAN by Louise Erdrich, CIRCE by Madeline Miller, which Juniors had a choice between, and the first 20 chapters of Charlotte Brontë’s JANE EYRE, was all rooted in relevance to her students. One of the threads connecting these seemingly unrelated books is their strong female protagonists in coming-of-age narratives.
In an all-girls school like The Baldwin School, female role models are omnipresent. Though Baldwin students are exposed to many women protagonists, representation is important. Having limited real-life interactions is different from seeing strong women develop over the course of a story they are driving.
In addition to personal relevance, all three books were chosen with the curriculum in mind, as “all of them will relate to the curricular texts throughout the year,” Dr. Brown said.
From the students’ perspective, some of these intentions translated, but not all.
Emerson Darlington ‘27 said she “didn’t really learn much” from JANE EYRE, but acknowledged that “it was very influential for women who were reading it when it came out to see that you don’t have to follow the traditional lifestyle of a woman [at the time it was written].”
When asked about her opinion on the ninth-grade summer reading — BLACKOUT by Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Ashley Woodfolk, and Nicola Yoon, and THE MARROW THIEVES by Cherie Dimaline — SaraRhian Payne said that BLACKOUT “was like the same short story, just with different people in different situations.”
Elena Grant ‘29 expressed similar sentiments. It felt like “a book you can read on your own time if you want to,” she said.
BLACKOUT, a collection of short stories that focus on Black characters during a New York power outage, differs from any book the freshman class has read, as it mainly focuses on interpersonal connections, specifically romances. Whereas previous assigned readings largely focused on comings-of-age in larger group dynamics, BLACKOUT’s intimate setup, which often has only two characters interacting at once, shifted the perception of what an assigned reading can mean.
Ms. Emily Davis, ninth grade English teacher who helped choose this year’s books with the Upper School English Department, shares a personal appreciation for Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s concept of representation providing mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors in books.
“I think that in some ways, reading reflects our lives back to us like a mirror, and in some ways it’s a perspective to a completely different world or voice, and sometimes it shifts our perspectives,” Ms. Davis said. “I think it’s very subjective in terms of who’s reading it. I think we bring a lot of our own experiences, and our own lens, to the things that we read.”
THE MARROW THIEVES, a futuristic dystopia in which Native Americans are hunted for their bone marrow, provided both a window and a sliding glass door to Zoey Schaubel ‘29, who said: “It made me feel very grateful about what I have now, because I understood that maybe my kids or my grandkids, they won’t have the same life as me, and they won’t have as much as I get to experience. I just remember to be grateful for the things I have now.”
As engagement with assigned texts varies between students, are there any ways to interact with more stories of interest? Though book selections are intentional, Dr. Brown invited students to suggest readings.
“If students had an incredible novel that they thought should be shared,” she said, “I would be delighted to hear about that.”