For Teen, Seven Days and 2,000 Pages to Go

School resumed last week, and here’s hoping that the advent of classes will actually lighten my daughter’s homework load.

If you’re the parent of a teenager and don’t know what I mean, then your kid either lacks the procrastination gene or was lucky enough to avoid the bane of summer for today’s high schoolers: the summer reading list.

When I was a teenager, homework was done from September to June, and summer was reserved for important things, like cheerleading practice, drive-in movies, late-night parties and part-time jobs.

Now, notes like this come home with June grades or arrive for our children in July’s mail: “We hope you have a wonderful summer. Here’s the list of 47 books you’re expected to read by the first day of school. Take notes. There will be a quiz ... “

Kids--being kids--toss the warnings aside and don’t think of them again until they’re just days away from the first school bell. Then it’s seven days to read 2,000 pages.

Hello, Cliff’s Notes and “Hey mom, has this book ever been made into a movie?”

I couldn’t help but feel sorry for my stressed-out daughter as her vacation wound down last week. She seldom emerged from her room, where a light burned through the night behind the closed door.

On her wall, she had posted a schedule, detailing how many hours she would spend each day on the six books on her reading list.

Whenever I asked how she was enjoying the novels, she’d stare back, glassy-eyed, muttering: “I’m on 140 ... “ or “Three hundred more ... “ Page numbers became stand-ins for literary reviews.

It made reading seem more like torture than the pleasure I remember from adolescent summers spent submerged in romance novels and trashy magazines.

That’s the danger of summer book mandates: They make reading just one more thing on a kid’s “to do” list; turning what should be a joy into an obligation.

“I tend to think vacation should be for vacation,” agrees Thomas Hudnut, headmaster at Harvard-Westlake School, one of the region’s most rigorous private schools, with campuses in Studio City and Bel-Air. “Our kids work awful hard from September to June. I don’t think it would kill them to kick back over the summer.”

During the school year, Harvard-Westlake students have more than four hours of homework on a typical night. But the school has no required summer reading.

Instead, “we provide our students with a list of great books from which they might choose something if they want to read over the summer,” Hudnut says. Anything more smacks of “the long arm of the law reaching into their summer. That seems oppressive and could very easily be resented.”

The dilemma is played out on less elite campuses as well. At Dorsey High, a public school in southwest Los Angeles, teachers shy away from giving too many summer assignments.

“We don’t want to confuse quantity with quality,” says Assistant Principal Catherine Webb. “Some people think if you give a lot of homework and a long list of books, you’re doing a good job.

“But we want kids to develop a desire to read.” So they ask students to read at least one book--any book--during the summer. About half say they do.

Other educators say summer reading requirements--and their requisite essays and tests--are needed to make sure students don’t waste valuable leisure time.

“Kids will not pick up a classic just to read. We have to force that kind of reading,” says Debra Logan, head of the English department at Whitney High, a Cerritos magnet school for high-achieving kids, where test scores rank among the best for public schools in the state.

California’s language arts guidelines suggest that high schoolers read the equivalent of one 350-page book each month, including during the summer.

At Whitney, incoming juniors are assigned “The Scarlet Letter” and “Huckleberry Finn;” seniors read “The Great Gatsby,” “Catcher in the Rye” and “Wuthering Heights.”

The books are then discussed in class during the semester’s early weeks.

Logan says most kids do like my daughter and wait until vacation’s waning days to open a book.

“These kids live quick, fast-paced lives,” with everything from the Internet to MTV. “Left to themselves, they might not read anything more challenging than a magazine. A novel takes a long time to read. To sit down and get through it, you have to have patience.”

Even if you make use of that patience only during summer’s final weeks.

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Now that she’s done, I appreciate my daughter’s summer reading, and I imagine she does, too.

She enjoyed five of the six novels she read, even though she plowed through them so quickly, much of their nuance must have dissolved in the blur.

Still, I can’t help but wonder where it stops, this push to make our kids work harder and longer, to accomplish more, get a head start on each year.

Teacher Geri Harding of Harvard-Westlake recalls spending youthful summers “kicking back under a tree, eating a peach and reading a book.

Now, as a mother and grandmother--and head of her school’s English department--she is trying to resist the pressure to push children so relentlessly that they miss the forest for the trees.

“The kind of freedom we had--those days are hard to hold on to. The whole focus for these little darlings, almost from the moment they’re born, is ‘What college am I going to?”’

And, for the last weeks of summer, at least, “What page am I on?”

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E-mail: sandy.banks@latimes.com.