Summary Of Pilgrimage To The Mother Country, By Joe Queenan

When I was in primary school, the teachers always gave us summer assignments. These summer workloads usually consisted of math, reading and essays. Well, after 3rd grade, essays became relevant. I’m not going to say that I didn’t procrastinate till the last week. Because I did. But maybe it was because I did not want to ruin my summer vacation with long, confusing and perplexing math problems. Or the task of reading and summarizing the book seemed like a daunting task for my little 9 year old brain. But, when I look back at the amount of work I really had to do, it was minuscule compared to the image I conjured in my mind. A more recent example would be H is for Hawk. When the assignment was given, no one really knew what this book was. We

The work seemed like it would drag on until the end of summer. Joe Queenan, the author of “Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile’s Pilgrimage to the Mother Country,” recounts not only the experiences of his son’s reading assignments but also his own experiences more than 40 years ago. When he went he thought of his experiences, Queenan felt that he could relate to his son and his classmates even though these traumatic events were experienced decades apart. I agree with Queenan on his view that teachers should pick books that would appeal to the students. I think that this philosophy should be applied to every other subject as well. Make math problems interactive. Make books more appealing to the target audience. Make writing assignments a small project. These small changes can change how a student looks at summer

They might argue that summer vacation is supposed to be a time where we leave school behind and fill the empty space with fun and boredom. That’s the meaning of summer vacation. But I’m presenting an argument that is supposed to make those assignments not boring or traumatic. They might not be an ideal way to spend summer vacation but the hope is to make them more bearable. Because without summer assignments, you would have to make up that dumping of knowledge you did at the beginning of the summer. This lost knowledge is a huge factor in why there is a big achievement gap in the United States. As Smink noted, the vacation very causes a phenomenon called the “summer learning loss.” This summer learning loss seems to accumulate over time and that is not what an effect of school should be. So one hand, many students don't want summer reading because of bad experiences but I think that they need to understand summer assignments are not supposed to corrode but instead preserve their