Students Entering Grade 12: Recommended/Required Summer Reading List

Required Reading & Podcast Project:
Incoming Twelfth Grade Honors and Writing Fellows

  • The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch 
    Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can't help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy? When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave--"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"--wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.
    Students will apply lessons from The Last Lecture as inspiration for the college and scholarship essays they will create during the first weeks of each semester.
  • Click here to view The Last Lecture Study Guide.
  • Click here to view the details of the required Podcast Project for incoming Twelfth Grade Honors students and Writing Fellows.

Required Reading:
Incoming Advanced Placement Students

Recommended Reading: All 12th Grade  

  • If I was Your Girl by Meredith Russo
    Eighteen-year-old Amanda Hardy only wants to fit in at her new high school, but she is keeping a big secret. So when she falls for Grant, guarded Amanda finds herself yearning to share with him everything about herself, including her previous life as Andrew.
  • Lies We Tell Ourselves by Robin Talley
    In 1959 Virginia Linda Hairston, who has been taught all her life that the races shold be kept "separate but equal," must work on a school project with Sarah Dunbar, one of the first African-American students at the all-white Jefferson High School.
     
  • Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcom Gladwell 
    Malcom Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high achievers different?
     
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams 
    Earth is about to be destroyed in order to make room for an intergalactic "expressway". It's going to be "one of those days". And that's just the start of this science fiction farce.
     
  • The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids by Alexander Robbins 
    Robbins explores how our high stakes educational culture has spiraled out of control. Robbins tackles teen issues such as intense stress, the student and teacher cheating epidemic, sports rage, parental guilt, the black market for study drugs, and a college admissions process.
     
  • The Pregnancy Project by Gaby Rodriguez
    Rodriguez, whose mother and older sister both became pregnant as teenagers, explains what she learned from faking a pregnancy as a high school senior in order to find out how people would treat her.
     
  • The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner
    The son of a Pentecostal preacher faces his personal demons as he and his two outcast friends try to make it through their senior year of high school in rural Forrestville, Tennessee without letting the small-town culture destroy their creative spirits and sense of self.
     
  • The Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose 
    As a sophomore at Brown University, Kevin Roose didn't have much contact with the Religious Right. Raised in a secular home by staunchly liberal parents, he fit right in with Brown's student body. So when he had a chance to encounter a group of students from Liberty University, a conservative Baptist university in Lynchburg, Virginia, he found himself staring across a massive culture gap.

 

If you are having difficulty finding and acquiring a text for summer reading, please click here to email Lori Jolley in the Curriculum Department.