Summer Reading

Dear Incoming Eleventh graders,

We hope this note finds you well and enjoying a wonderful summer so far. We look forward to welcoming you back – or welcoming you for the first time – to our English classrooms in the Arms Building when you return to campus in the fall.

We write to you now to give you a bit of guidance as you begin your journey as an 11th-grader with your first task: your summer reading. Your assignment is to read four texts from the summer reading list: three that you choose from the list, and one that is a grade-wide text. The grade-wide text for all incoming 11th-graders is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. As you dig into The Great Gatsby, a text that each class will engage with at the beginning of the year, we as eleventh-grade English teachers want to offer you a few things to keep in mind, as well as a few questions to consider as you read. First, a couple of things to keep in mind:

• We urge you, as you read, to pay close attention to anything that strikes you as interesting or noteworthy within the novel. Please note these elements in your book and/or in a notebook – someplace you will be able to access and refer back to when we begin discussions in class. In other words, please be sure you’re annotating as you read.
• Try to limit distractions, especially technology, as you read. Put devices away so you can fully enter the world of the text.
• Resist the urge to go to the Internet or AI with your questions about the text. Instead, attend to your uncertainties by reading the novel itself more closely. If you have questions, write them down! Save them, and they will serve as fuel for conversation when we convene in the fall.
• If you choose to listen to an audiobook of The Great Gatsby, go for it! Please also read the text on paper, either simultaneously or as a re-read. Listening to a book can also get in the way of annotating, so be sure, if you are listening to the text, that you are still taking time to take notes in your book or notebook.
• Bring your copy of The Great Gatsby, with your annotations, to school with you and to our first classes. Be ready to write about the novel and to talk about it (so, if you finish it in June, maybe give it another glance in August). And next, a few questions to consider as you read:
• How does the narrator describe the people and places he encounters? Is he as non-judgmental as he claims to be, and to what extent is he complicit in the society he observes?
• How does the novel depict the relationships between various social classes?
• What comment(s) do you suppose Fitzgerald makes about the American experience throughout the novel? These questions are by no means the only questions to consider in relation to the text; this is simply a place to start.

We are excited to dig into these questions – and others – together in discussion when you get to campus in the fall. In the meantime, we wish you restful and relaxing summers!

Yours in reading,

Your Eleventh- Grade English Teachers