Summer Reading

In my sophomore year of high school, we had to present our summer reading project so our English class. Over the summer, I had read Isaac Asimov’s I Robot. I got up in front of my class and my first words were “The movie is completely wrong.” I looked out at my class and saw the faces of three of my classmates drop in shock. I continued my presentation, which went well, and later sat and watched the rest. One of the shocked classmates got up and went to present his poster and thoughts on the book. The problem was that he had not read the book; he had watched the movie and got his information from that. Whether or not it is intentional, summer reading lists containing novels with movie adaptations trick students into not reading.
It is my opinion that the summer reading list is an English teacher’s tool to help weed out the students that will work hard in their classes that particular year. They add books to the list, like I Robot, that have been adapted into movies, trying to get students to pick them and take the easy way out and make fools of themselves when they find the book is much different from the movie. They also make it hard on students who choose books with movie adaptations that are accurate to the story, almost not believing that the student read the book.
This has happened many times to me in the past. I have received reading lists from schools that contain many books that I considered boring and a few that were made into movies. Many times I picked the book that was made into the movie, not to take the easy way out, but because I thought it may be interesting if Hollywood would make a movie about it. And every time, I actually read the book, so as to not get tricked like many others. In the case of I Robot, only the basic premise of the story remains the same in the movie. Any student who picked it and watched the movie only was in trouble before they knew it. This was the same with Jurassic Park. The movie was already in production before Michael Crichton was done writing the book. This caused major differences between the book and movie, a situation I believe the English teachers were well aware of.
Sometimes it’s not as simple as that. Sometimes the movie adaptation is accurate to the book itself, so much so that the teachers do not believe that the student really read the book just by listening to their speech. This is the case with books such as The Da Vinci Code. The movie was accurate on the important points of the book for the most part, and the presentations of our projects are meant to hit the important parts. Only minute differences occur in the film adaptation. Another case of this is with The Lord of the Rings. Although much of the story was taken out of the film versions, the parts that were left were true to the books. It is difficult for a student to prove they have actually done the work with these types of books.
There are a number of ways to overcome situations like these so you do not end up like the students in my previous classes. One such way is to avoid these books all together. This will insure that you must read the book and the temptation of taking the easy way out is non-existent. Another way is to always read the book, whether it has a movie adaptation or not. By doing this, you can make sure you have all the facts of both, and can even compare and contrast the movie to prove that you did your work. If the film version is accurate, one could pick out the most obscure fact about the book that was not in the movie and mention it. This proves you read the book and that anyone second guessing you did not.
English teachers use the summer reading project to pinpoint which students may slack in their class. They add books that have been turned into movies to the list to trick the students into basing their grade on a film that is not accurate. It becomes hard for these students to prove that they did the work when it seems the teachers are so set on not believing them. This has happened to me many times, but works to your advantage if you know how to stop their tricks.