Student Reader - Unit 3

UNIT
Pre-AP English 1
®
STUDENT READER
Compelling Evidence
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Contents
“The Work You Do, the Person You Are” by Toni Morrison .................................................................... 1
“Drowning in Dishes, but Finding a Home” by Danial Adkison ............................................................. 5
“What to Do with the Kids This Summer? Put ’Em to Work” by Ben Sasse ................................... 11
“The Decline of the American Teenager’s Summer Job” by Lexington .......................................... 17
“Teenagers Have Stopped Getting Summer Jobs—Why?” by Derek Thompson ....................... 21
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“The Work You Do, the
Person You Are”
TONI MORRISON
From The New Yorker
Student Reader 1 Pre-AP English 1

© 2021 College Board

“The Work You Do, the Person You Are”
Unit 3
The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound.

MY NOTES
I was not like the children in folktales: burdensome mouths to
feed.
1 All I had to do for the two dollars was clean Her house for a
few hours after school. It was a beautiful house, too, with a
plastic-covered sofa and chairs, wall-to-wall blue-and-white
carpeting, a white enamel stove, a washing machine and
a dryer—things that were common in Her neighborhood,
absent in mine. In the middle of the war, She had butter, sugar,
steaks, and seam-up-the-back stockings.
2 I knew how to scrub floors on my knees and how to wash

clothes in our zinc tub, but I had never seen a Hoover vacuum
cleaner or an iron that wasn’t heated by fire.
3 Part of my pride in working for Her was earning money I

could squander: on movies, candy, paddleballs, jacks, ice-
cream cones. But a larger part of my pride was based on the
fact that I gave half my wages to my mother, which meant
that some of my earnings were used for real things—an
insurance-policy payment or what was owed to the milkman
or the iceman. The pleasure of being necessary to my
parents was profound. I was not like the children in folktales:
burdensome mouths to feed, nuisances to be corrected,
problems so severe that they were abandoned to the forest.
I had a status that doing routine chores in my house did not
provide—and it earned me a slow smile, an approving nod
from an adult. Confirmations that I was adultlike, not childlike.
4 In those days, the forties, children were not just loved or liked;
they were needed. They could earn money; they could care
for children younger than themselves; they could work the
farm, take care of the herd, run errands, and much more. I
suspect that children aren’t needed in that way now. They are
loved, doted on, protected, and helped. Fine, and yet …
5 Little by little, I got better at cleaning Her house—good

enough to be given more to do, much more. I was ordered to
carry bookcases upstairs and, once, to move a piano from
one side of a room to the other. I fell carrying the bookcases.
And after pushing the piano my arms and legs hurt so badly.
I wanted to refuse, or at least to complain, but I was afraid
She would fire me, and I would lose the freedom the dollar
Pre-AP English 1 2 Student Reader


“The Work You Do, the Person You Are”
Unit 3
gave me, as well as the standing I had at home—although

MY NOTES
both were slowly being eroded. She began to offer me
her clothes, for a price. Impressed by these worn things,
which looked simply gorgeous to a little girl who had only
two dresses to wear to school, I bought a few. Until my
mother asked me if I really wanted to work for castoffs. So
I learned to say “No, thank you” to a faded sweater offered
for a quarter of a week’s pay.
6 Still, I had trouble summoning the courage to discuss or

object to the increasing demands She made. And I knew
that if I told my mother how unhappy I was she would tell
me to quit. Then one day, alone in the kitchen with my
father, I let drop a few whines about the job. I gave him
details, examples of what troubled me, yet although he
listened intently, I saw no sympathy in his eyes. No “Oh,
you poor little thing.” Perhaps he understood that what I
wanted was a solution to the job, not an escape from it. In
any case, he put down his cup of coffee and said, “Listen.
You don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to
work. Get your money. And come on home.”
7 That was what he said. This was what I heard:
1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but

for yourself.
2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.
3. Your real life is with us, your family.
4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you
are.
8 I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses

and morons, quick-witted and dull, bighearted and narrow.
I’ve had many kinds of jobs, but since that conversation
with my father I have never considered the level of labor
to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the
security of a job above the value of home.


“Drowning in Dishes,
but Finding a Home”
DANIAL ADKISON
From The New York Times


“Drowning in Dishes, but Finding a Home”
Unit 3
MY NOTES
© The New York Times
1 The people who make a difference in your life come in all

types. Some write on a chalkboard. Some wear a sports
uniform. Some wear a suit and tie. For me, that person wore a
tie with a Pizza Hut logo on it.
2 I started working at Pizza Hut in December 1989, when I was a

freshman in high school. Parents in my small western Colorado
town encouraged teenagers to work in the service industry
after school and on weekends. It kept us out of trouble.
3 Having a job also kept me out of the house. I grew up mostly

with my mother, and I never knew my biological father. My
younger sister, younger brother and I went through a series
of stepfathers. My relationship with those men was almost
always fraught, and I was always looking for reasons to be
away from home.
4 The Pizza Hut was old, and in the back it had three giant sinks
instead of a dishwasher. One basin was for soapy water, one
for rinsing and the other for sanitizing, using a tablet that
made me cough when I dropped it into the hot water. All new
employees started by washing dishes and busing tables. If
they proved their mettle, they learned to make pizzas, cut and
serve them on wooden paddles and take orders.
5 On my first night, the dishes piled up after the dinner rush:

plates, silverware, cups and oily black deep-dish pans, which
came clean only with a lot of soap and scrubbing in steaming-


Unit 3
hot water. I couldn’t keep up, and stacks of dishes formed

MY NOTES
on all sides of me. Every time I made a dent in the pile,
the call came back for help clearing tables out front, and I
returned with brown tubs full of more dirty dishes.
6 At home, the chore I hated most was dishes. A few years

earlier, my mother’s then boyfriend instilled a loathing
of that task by making me scrub the Teflon off a cookie
sheet, believing that it was grease, while he sat on the
couch and smoked cigarettes. That boyfriend was gone,
but another with a different set of problems had taken his
place.
7 My shift was supposed to end at 9 p.m., but when I asked

to leave, the manager, Jeff, shook his head. “Not until the
work is done,” he said. “You leave a clean station.” I was
angry and thought about quitting, but I scrubbed, rinsed
and sanitized until after 10 that night.
8 I stayed on dish duty for weeks. My heart sank every

time I arrived at work and saw my name written next to
“dishes” on the position chart. I spent my shifts behind
those steel sinks, being splashed with greasy water. After
work, my red-and-white-checked button-up shirt and
gray polyester pants smelled like onions, olives and oil.
At home, I sometimes found green peppers in my socks. I
hated every minute I spent on dish duty, and I wasn’t afraid
to let everyone around me know it.
9 One slow midweek night, when I managed to catch up

on dishes and clean out the sinks early, I asked Jeff
when I could do something different. “Do you know
why you’re still doing dishes?” he asked. “Because you
keep complaining about it.” Nobody likes to work with
a complainer, he said. But, he promised, if I continued
to leave a clean station and not complain, next week he
would put me on the “make table,” where pizzas were
assembled before being put into the oven.
10 A few days later, when I reported for my after-school shift,

I saw my name penciled not in the “dishes” box but in the
“make table” box. I was ecstatic.


Unit 3
11 Jeff had a special way of running his restaurant. From a crop

MY NOTES
of teenagers, he assembled a team of employees who cared
about their work—and one another. Most of my best friends
from high school also worked at Pizza Hut, and some of my
best memories were made under that red roof.
12 Pizza Hut became not only my escape from home but also, in
many ways, an alternate home. In my real home, I felt unstable
and out of control. At work, the path seemed clear: Work hard
and do things right, and you will succeed. This model had not
seemed possible before.
13 For one of the first times in my life, I felt empowered. By

the time I was in 11th grade, Jeff had promoted me to shift
manager. By my senior year, I was an assistant manager,
responsible for much of the bookkeeping, inventory and
scheduling. I was in charge when Jeff was away.
14 Our staff was like a second family. We had all-day staff

parties that started with rafting trips and ended with dinner
and movies. Most of us played on a softball team. We went
camping together. We had water fights in the parking lot and
played music on the jukebox, turned up to full blast, after all
the customers had left.
15 Jeff was the leader of this unlikely family. He was about

15 years older than me and had recently gone through a
divorce. I never considered it at the time, because he seemed
to be having as much fun as everyone else, but if I was using
my job to create the family I wish I’d had, it was possible that
he was, too.
16 Senior year arrived, and though I loved that job, I knew I would
go to college the next fall. I was an A student in class but
probably about a C-minus in applying to schools. My mom
hadn’t gone to college, and I didn’t have a lot of logistical or
financial support at home. I had received a pile of brochures
from colleges, but I didn’t know where to start—and, at $40,
every application fee cost me half a day’s pay.
17 A guidance counselor persuaded me to apply to Boston

University, which seemed great, primarily because of its
distance from Colorado. The scholarship application had to
be in by the end of November—and I was definitely not going
there without a big scholarship. But maybe because of the fee


Unit 3
or because of my sheer cluelessness, I kept putting off the

MY NOTES
application.
18 I still had not mailed it the day before it was due. At

work that day, I offhandedly mentioned to Jeff that an
application was due the next day but that I hadn’t mailed it.
He opened a drawer and took out an overnight envelope.
He told me to stop what I was doing, leave work and send
the application immediately. I protested about the expense
of overnight postage, but he said he would cover it.
19 I ended up getting into B.U., with a scholarship, but I still

had never even visited Boston. Though my mom worked
hard to take care of my siblings and me, there just was
no room in the budget to send me on a college visit. So
I figured I would just see the school when I got there in
August.
20 Jeff surprised me with an early graduation present: a trip

to Boston. He paid for the hotel, the car and the plane
tickets. We toured campus and visited Fenway Park and
did some sightseeing around New England. We ate at a
lot of Pizza Huts, and we judged them against ours. The
verdict: None of them seemed to be very much fun.
21 Before I headed to college, I told Jeff that I would come

back to work over winter break. While I was away, he was
promoted to regional manager, and a different person
was put in charge of our store. I went back anyway, and
though I did my best to enjoy it, the magic was gone. The
family had dispersed, and I felt free to shift my mind-set to
college and the future.
22 I have kept in touch with Jeff over the years. We usually

meet for lunch when I’m in town. Sometimes we even have
pizza.
23 Washing dishes for Jeff was grueling, greasy work. But

then again, making a pizza, or driving a truck, or baking
a cake, or any of countless other jobs are not always
enjoyable in themselves, either. Out of all the lessons
I learned from that guy in the Pizza Hut tie, maybe the
biggest is that any job can be the best job if you have the
right boss.


“ What to Do with the
Kids This Summer?
Put ’Em to Work”
BEN SASSE
From The New York Times


“What to Do with the Kids This Summer? Put ’Em to Work”
Unit 3
1 Summer break 1985 was defined by my 4:30 a.m. alarm. The

MY NOTES
bus rolled up at 5, and my friends and I stumbled on, fighting off
sleep until we arrived at the fields. Detasseling corn was a rite
of passage in this Nebraska town: In order to cross-pollinate
top-notch seed corn in those days, you needed people, lots of
them, to walk through the fields to pull corn tassels manually
from individual rows.
2 The job stank. It’s wet and chilly in the field that early. Giant
sprinklers called center pivots often got stuck and flooded
acres with ankle-deep cold water. We’d start out wearing
sweatshirts underneath trash bag ponchos, but by 10, as
temperatures approached triple digits, we’d shed layers. For
the rest of the day, our bare skin would brush against sharp
corn leaves until it was marked with innumerable paper cuts.
3 We would get home covered in nasty rashes, caked in mud

and bone-tired. I’d go to bed in the late afternoon and sleep
straight through till the alarm sounded again, for weeks on
end.
4 That was our summer vacation. What do our kids do today?
5 It’s not an idle question. Nearly a quarter-century on, when I

became the president of Midland University back in this same
Nebraska town, one of the first things I noticed was how few of
our students had done any hard physical work before college.
Detasseling corn, like a lot of agricultural work, is now done
mostly by machine.
6 And parents, on the whole, had fewer household labor

needs and could afford to spare their kids the less pleasant
experiences of their own childhoods, while providing them
with things they wish they’d had, as well as opportunities to
cultivate new skills. The time our students didn’t spend in
school was mostly spent consuming: products, media and
entertainment, especially entertainment.
7 Another thing I noticed was an unnerving passivity. When

I saw students doing their campus jobs, they seemed to
have a tough time. Over and over, faculty members and
administrators noted how their students’ limited experience
with hard work made them oddly fuzzy-headed when facing
real-world problems rather than classroom tests.


Unit 3
8 I was worried. How would these kids survive once they left
MY NOTES
home for good? And how would an America built on self-
discipline and deferred gratification survive?
9 Adolescence is a great thing, but we’ve made it too long.

It’s supposed to be a protected space in which kids
who’ve become biologically adult are not obligated to
immediately become emotionally, morally and financially
adult. Done right, adolescence is a greenhouse phase, but
adolescence should not be an escape from adulthood; it
should be when we learn how to become adults.
10 We’re parenting too much, too long. Our efforts to protect

our kids from hurt feelings, tedious chores, money worries
and the like are well intentioned. But many of us, perhaps
especially middle-class parents, are unwittingly enabling
many of our kids to not grow up.
11 What can we do about it—especially during these long

summer months when our kids expect to be entertained?
What’s the modern equivalent of detasseling corn?
12 My wife, Melissa, and I, together with our neighbors, try to

create experiences for our kids that build character. We
want our kids to exercise their muscles and their minds.
13 Last year, we sent our eldest child, Corrie, then 14, to

spend a month working on a cattle ranch. When we
dropped her off, she was nervous but eager. Between
checking cows for pregnancies—a job that involves a
shoulder-length glove—and bottle-feeding orphaned
heifers, she loved it and hated it. But she knew that her
mild suffering was also a formative experience for a
lifetime.
14 Not everyone lives in a big cattle state, and younger kids

require more parental supervision. I also don’t romanticize
agrarian life—there’s too much manure around for it to be
truly idyllic—but meaningful work for kids is less about any
particular task than the habits the hours teach. The effort
involved and the struggles, once overcome, become the
scar tissue of future character.


Unit 3
15 Look around your neighborhood and see what ways your kids
MY NOTES
could serve their community. Even in this digital age, lawns
need to be mowed and lemonade stands can break even.
16 Older folks will benefit from the help, and your kids will gain
from the perspective of people who’ve been on the planet
longer than they have. Younger kids can work alongside Mom
and Dad, too ( just know that everything will take twice as
long). The point isn’t how perfect your neighbor’s lawn looks;
the point is that your kids can learn to work toward making a
contribution to their community.
17 We should also encourage our kids to travel. I’m not talking

about the grand European tour or the Chevy Chase road
trip. Travel is simply an opportunity to help our kids to get
out of their comfort zones, learn to see different social and
economic arrangements. I remember my wife (then my
college girlfriend) tugging me along to volunteer on a re-entry
preparation program for Boston inmates.
18 Start close to home and visit a different neighborhood—you

don’t have eyes to see your own community until you’ve
visited another. Travel need not be about changing locations,
but reaching across generations to break out of the artificial
age segregation of our era. Getting out of one’s own bubble
can be dramatic.
19 Few experiences help our kids discover the distinction between

needs and wants like the great outdoors. It doesn’t have to be
a hike through the Yukon, but just living out of a backpack for a
long weekend where they take an active role in planning meals,
buying food, picking a site and setting up the tent. The key thing
is not to have been passive consumers on someone else’s trip.
They’ll have been the planners, the decision makers and the
risk calculators, while you’re still there to make sure nothing
goes too far off the rails.
20 We also want our kids to travel into literature. So we work

with our children to build reading lists of books that they
will wrestle with and be shaped by for the rest of their lives.
Becoming a reader grows our horizons, our appetite for the
good, the true and the beautiful, and our empathy.


Unit 3
21 Not everything will work for every family. The challenge of

MY NOTES
adolescence is not going to be solved in a single summer.
The health of our republic depends on shared principles
like the First Amendment, but it is also built on the Teddy
Roosevelt-like vigor of its citizens and local self-reliance.
This should be a gift of these long summer days to our
children.
22 My grandfather had a saying from the farm that “every hour

of sleep before midnight is worth two hours of sleep after
midnight.” I don’t know about the science of that, yet I know
what he meant: that you should get up and out to work early
enough that you’re tired enough to feel the value of being
able to get to bed early again.
23 I learned that lesson in 1985. If my kids get nothing else

from this summer, I hope they learn it, too.


“The Decline of the
American Teenager’s
Summer Job”
LEXINGTON
From The Economist


“The Decline of the American Teenager’s Summer Job”
Unit 3
It is striking how often self-made Americans have stories to

MY NOTES
tell about boring summer jobs
1 The first time that Ronald Reagan appeared on a newspaper

front page was as a teenage lifeguard, hailed for saving a
drowning man from a fast-flowing river. The future president
was not yet “Ronnie,” America’s reassuring, twinkling,
optimist-in-chief. He was still “Dutch,” to use his childhood
nickname: a slim, bespectacled youth, serious to the point
of priggishness. A biographer, Garry Wills, unearthed a
high school yearbook in which Reagan scolded swimmers
he pulled from the cool, treacherous Rock River, near his
boyhood home of Dixon, Illinois. “A big hippopotamus with
a sandwich in each hand, and some firewater tanked away,”
Reagan wrote of one. Each summer from 1927 to 1932 the
teenager would rise early to collect a 300lb block of ice and
hamburger supplies before driving in his employer’s van to
the river, working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. The
post offered responsibility, money for college and stability
in a childhood blighted by frequent moves, brushes with
financial ruin and his father’s drinking. There was glory, too:
in all he saved 77 lives. A picture of the Rock River hung in
Reagan’s Oval Office.
2 Strikingly often, self-made Americans have stories to share

about teenage jobs, involving alarm clocks clanging before
dawn, aching muscles, stern bosses and soul-fortifying hours
of boredom. In 1978, a record year in the annals of the Bureau
of Labour Statistics, 72% of all teenagers were employed
in July, the peak month for youthful ice-cream scooping,
shelf-stacking and burger-flipping. But for two decades the
traditional summer job has been in decline, with 43% of teens
working in July 2016.
3 Lexington decided to head to Dixon to ask why. This being an

anxious and litigious age, Reagan’s river beach is closed now.
But the YMCA that trained him in lifesaving (and where he
paraded as a drum major) still hires lifeguards. This summer
finds one of them, Lexi Nelson, 18, between high school and
community college, where she will study dental hygiene.
Perhaps a quarter of her friends are working this season.
The rest have mixed views of her job, which can start at five
in the morning. “When I get up early they bash on it,” Miss


Unit 3
Nelson reports, “but most of the time they’re jealous of

MY NOTES
the money.” Lifeguarding in an indoor pool is not the most
exciting job, she concedes, but that teaches patience.
4 The story of the vanishing job is not a simple one. Ask

teenagers, their employers and the mayor of Dixon—a
business-owner who hires teenagers each summer at a
pair of sandwich shops and a frozen yogurt store—and
they point to two main causes: well-meaning adults and a
changing economy.
5 Reagan’s stirring example is still taught in Dixon, a trim,

conservative town, with an equestrian statue of the
president on its riverfront and loudspeakers on lamp-
posts that play the Carpenters and other easy-listening
classics. But many parents discourage teens from
working, it is widely agreed. Parents instead tell their
children to study, take summer courses, volunteer or
practise for sports that might help them compete for
college places.
6 Local keepers of the Reagan flame see a town still filled

with opportunities for self-advancement. Patrick Gorman,
director of the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home, a museum
that preserves a house rented by the president’s family in
Dixon, is confident that anyone who wants a job can find
one, even if it might be “detasseling” corn—picking pollen
tassels from growing corn cobs, an arduous summer
task traditionally reserved for the young, involving cold
mornings, baking middays and scratches from corn
leaves. Mr Gorman easily found six teenagers to volunteer
as museum guides: “Good kids migrate to good kids,” he
beams.
7 Not all teenagers have the same needs. The three

lifeguards interviewed at the YMCA are either college-
bound or plan to be, and part-time work suits them.
Bosses at the “Y” note that youngsters with only a high-
school education typically have a different goal: landing a
full-time job with health insurance and benefits.
8 Liandro Arellano Jr., Dixon’s mayor, argues that teenage

job prospects have been complicated by well-intentioned
politicians raising the state-wide minimum wage to


Unit 3
$8.25 an hour. For that pay it is both tempting and possible

MY NOTES
to hire college students or older workers with a proven job
record, references and the ability to turn up on time, says
Mr Arellano, a Republican. The youngest workers, below 18,
earn $7.75 but need more training, and those aged 15 need
work permits and cannot touch slicers or big bread knives.
Larger economic forces have buffeted Dixon, too. After the
credit crunch of 2008, a flood of laid-off factory workers
and experienced adults wanted to work for Mr Arellano. With
unemployment rates now below 5% in Dixon, applicants for
entry-level jobs are getting younger again. Teenagers can be
fine summer helpers, he says—“They’re very excited about
their first job”—though keeping them off smartphones is “a
constant battle.”
Buy That Teenager an Alarm Clock

9 Nationwide, affluent white teenagers have historically been
much more likely to take summer jobs than lower-income,
non-white youths. Family connections help, and it is easier
to find work at a golf course or tennis club than amid inner-
city blight. Though big cities like Chicago, 100 miles from
Dixon, have government-run schemes that prod employers
to offer summer work, demand exceeds supply: last year
77,000 Chicago youths applied for 31,000 summer jobs or
internships. For all that, some of Mr Arellano’s worst staff
have been youngsters who do not need the money or want a
job reference: they are the ones who quit without warning to
go on a family holiday. Well-off parents are not always “super-
supportive,” he sighs.
10 Some parents may question the value of manual work in an

age of high-tech change. But an elite education counts for
little without self-discipline and resilience. Drudgery can
teach humility: when hauling boxes, a brain full of algebra
matters less than a teen’s muscles. At best, it can breach the
social barriers that harm democracy. Summer jobs are called
all-American for a reason.


“Teenagers
Have
Stopped Getting
Summer Jobs—Why?”
DEREK THOMPSON
From The Atlantic


“Teenagers Have Stopped Getting Summer Jobs—Why?”
Unit 3
Most used to work in July and August. Now the vast majority
MY NOTES
don’t. Are they being lazy, or strategic?
1 The summer job is considered a rite of passage for the

American Teenager. It is a time when tossing newspaper
bundles and bussing restaurant tables acts as a rehearsal for
weightier adult responsibilities, like bundling investments and
bussing dinner-party plates. But in the last few decades, the
summer job has been disappearing. In the summer of 1978,
60 percent of teens were working or looking for work. Last
summer, just 35 percent were.
2 Why did American teens stop trying to get summer jobs? One
typical answer is: They’re just kids, and kids are getting lazier.
3 One can rule out that hypothesis pretty quickly. The number
of teens in the workforce has collapsed since 2000, as the
graph below shows. But the share of NEETs—young people
who are “Neither in Education, Employment, or Training”—
has been extraordinarily steady. In fact, it has not budged
more than 0.1 percentage point since the late 1990s. Just
7 percent of American teens are NEETs, which is lower than
France and about the same as the mean of all advanced
economies in the OECD. The supposed laziness of American
teenagers is unchanging and, literally, average.
Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate: 16-to-19-Year-Olds
60
55
50
Percent
45
40
35
30
1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010


Unit 3
4 A better answer is that teenagers aren’t spending more

MY NOTES
time on the couch, but rather spending more time in the
classroom. Education is to blame, rather than indolence.
Teens are remaining in high school longer, going to college
more often, and taking more summer classes. The percent
of recent high-school graduates enrolled in college—both
two-year and four-year—has grown by 25 percentage
points. That is almost exactly the decline in the teenage
labor-force participation rate.
Teen-Labor Participation Rate vs. Share of New High School Graduates

in College
75
% Recent HS Graduates Enrolled in College Classes
70 Teen-Labor Participation Rate
65
60
55
Percent
50
45
40
35
30
1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015
5 With tougher high-school requirements and greater

pressure to go to college, summer classes are the new
summer job. The percent of 16-to-19-year-olds enrolled in
summer school has tripled in the last 20 years, according
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The rise may be
directly related to the fact that parents and high schools
are encouraging students to take on more classwork,
according to Ben Steverman, a Bloomberg reporter who
covers teen employment. He finds that the percentage
of high-school grads completing at least four years of
English, three years of science, math, and social science,
and two years of foreign language has sextupled since the
early 1980s.


Unit 3
Share of Teenagers Taking Summer Classes

MY NOTES
60 60
50 50
40 40
Percent
Percent
30 30
20 20
10 10
0 0
1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009
6 The second reason why teens work less today is that

employers are more reluctant to hire them. First, the rise of
low-skill immigration in the last few decades has created
more competition for exactly the sort of jobs that teenagers
used to do, like grocery-store cashiers, restaurant servers,
and retail salespeople. Second, older Americans stay in the
workforce longer than ever, and many of them wind down
their careers in office secretary and retail jobs, which used
to be the province of 16-year-olds in the summer. Third, the
number of federally funded summer jobs, where students
work temporarily with their local government, has declined. At
the same time, the minimum wage has grown, which may have
discouraged bosses from taking on young inexperienced
workers who are only “worth” hiring at a salary that’s become
illegal. Together, these policies have reduced the number of
temporary paid jobs for teenagers in the public and private
sector. Fourth, companies have caught on to the fact that if
they want to hire teenagers, they don’t have to pay them, at
all: There has been an extraordinary rise in unpaid internships
over the last decade. Although these teenage interns are
clearly working, they don’t show up in the official employment
statistics, because they’re not getting paid.
7 The last big-picture explanation for the demise of teen

summer jobs is cultural. Teenagers are exquisitely sensitive
to the social norms of their peers. If they see cool older
teenagers scooping ice cream during their freshman summer,
they’ll really look forward to a job scooping ice cream during
their sophomore summer. But any social feedback loop
can spin both ways. Recently, the cultural norm is shifting


Unit 3
toward summer classes and unpaid internships rather

MY NOTES
than summer jobs. Since the mid-1990s, the share of
teenagers who say they wish they were working has
fallen by about 50 percent, according to the BLS. That
suggests—although it cannot prove—that summer jobs
have lost cultural cachet, as the norm has shifted away
from working.
Share of Non-Working Teens Who Say They Wish They Were Working
30 30
25 25
20 20
Percent
Percent
15 15
10 10
5 5
0 0
1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
8 It’s important to note that it’s probably white adults who

feel the strongest nostalgia for summer jobs. Here’s a look
at the teen participation rate for the last two full years for
whites, Hispanics, and blacks. Each July and August sees
a 10-point jump in the number of white teenage workers, a
5-point jump in the number of Hispanic teen workers, and
hardly any movement among black teenagers. (There is
evidence that Asian teens are more like white teens in this
regard.)
Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate: 16 to 19 Years, White

Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate: 16 to 19 Years, Black or African American
Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate: 16 to 19 Years, Hispanic or Latino
50
45
40
Percent
35
30
25
May 2015 Sep 2015 Jan 2016 May 2016 Sep 2016 Jan 2017


Unit 3
9 Compare that to 1978 and 1979, the statistical peak of the

MY NOTES
teen summer job. In July and August in the late 1970s, 30
percent of white teens flooded into the labor force, along
with 20 percent of Hispanics. Again, black teen participation
hardly budged.
Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate: 16 to 19 Years, White

Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate: 16 to 19 Years, Black or African American
Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate: 16 to 19 Years, Hispanic or Latino
75
70
65
60
Percent
55
50
45
40
35
May 1978 Sep 1978 Jan 1979 May 1979 Sep 1979 Jan 1980
10 Putting these two graphs together, two things are clear. First,
the summer-job bump has declined for all ethnicities in the
last 40 years. Second, summer jobs are the province of the
white and wealthy. Children of richer families are more likely
to take part-time summer jobs, according to a report from the
Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University.
But black and low-income teens are less likely to work, not
only because their neighborhoods have fewer opportunities,
but also because their families have fewer connections to
companies with internships and part-time jobs. Altogether,
summer jobs may be yet another vector through which
privilege becomes inherited from one generation to the next.
11 Is there any good reason to be nostalgic for teen summer

jobs? Don’t they teach kids responsibility, “soft skills,” and
a humbling tolerance for the tedium of office life? There are
several studies that show summer jobs for teens pay a long-
term dividend in higher earnings and reduced crime. But there
are even more studies hailing the benefits of high-school
completion and college attendance, and many teens have to
choose between education and work. (It will be interesting
to see if the summer job has a resurgence in the new low-
unemployment economy.)


Unit 3
12 The mysterious disappearance of the summer job

MY NOTES
for teenagers turns out to be a perfect parable for
the flexibility of the workforce. Many of the jobs that
teenagers used to do no longer exist; they’ve gone to
older Americans and new immigrants. But rather than use
the fallow months to quintuple their video-game time,
teenagers are taking the time to invest in their educational
future. This is hardly the place to expend America’s finite
national anxiety.


Credits
Unit 3
Credits
“The Decline of the American Teenager’s Summer Job.” © The Economist Group Limited,
London. July 6th, 2017.
“Drowning in Dishes, but Finding a Home” from The New York Times, Oct. 11, 2014,
copyright © 2014 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and
protected by the copyright laws of the United States.
“Teenagers Have Stopped Getting Summer Jobs—Why?” © 2017 The Atlantic Media Co., as
first published in The Atlantic magazine. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content
Agency, LLC.
“What to Do with the Kids This Summer? Put ’Em to Work” from The New York Times, July 28,
2017, copyright © 2017 Ben Sasse.
“The Work You Do, the Person You Are.” Copyright © 2017 by Toni Morrison. Reprinted by
permission of ICM Partners.


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UNIT

ENG1_U3_SR_Reader.indd 1 16/04/20 1:54 AM

PRE-AP EQUITY AND ACCESS POLICY

ENG1_U3_SR_Reader.indd 2 16/04/20 1:54 AM

“Drowning in Dishes, but Finding a Home” by Danial Adkison ............................................................. 5

“The Decline of the American Teenager’s Summer Job” by Lexington .......................................... 17

“Teenagers Have Stopped Getting Summer Jobs—Why?” by Derek Thompson ....................... 21

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Student Reader 1 Pre-AP English 1

ENG1_U3_SR_Reader.indd 1 03/04/20 8:42 PM

The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound.

2 I knew how to scrub floors on my knees and how to wash

3 Part of my pride in working for Her was earning money I

5 Little by little, I got better at cleaning Her house—good

Pre-AP English 1 2 Student Reader

ENG1_U3_SR_Reader.indd 2 03/04/20 8:42 PM

gave me, as well as the standing I had at home—although

6 Still, I had trouble summoning the courage to discuss or

7 That was what he said. This was what I heard:

1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but

3. Your real life is with us, your family.

8 I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses

Student Reader 3 Pre-AP English 1

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Student Reader 5 Pre-AP English 1

ENG1_U3_SR_Reader.indd 5 03/04/20 8:42 PM

© The New York Times

1 The people who make a difference in your life come in all

2 I started working at Pizza Hut in December 1989, when I was a

3 Having a job also kept me out of the house. I grew up mostly

5 On my first night, the dishes piled up after the dinner rush:

Pre-AP English 1 6 Student Reader

ENG1_U3_SR_Reader.indd 6 03/04/20 8:42 PM

hot water. I couldn’t keep up, and stacks of dishes formed

6 At home, the chore I hated most was dishes. A few years

7 My shift was supposed to end at 9 p.m., but when I asked

8 I stayed on dish duty for weeks. My heart sank every

9 One slow midweek night, when I managed to catch up

10 A few days later, when I reported for my after-school shift,

Student Reader 7 Pre-AP English 1

ENG1_U3_SR_Reader.indd 7 03/04/20 8:42 PM

11 Jeff had a special way of running his restaurant. From a crop

13 For one of the first times in my life, I felt empowered. By

14 Our staff was like a second family. We had all-day staff

15 Jeff was the leader of this unlikely family. He was about

17 A guidance counselor persuaded me to apply to Boston

Pre-AP English 1 8 Student Reader

ENG1_U3_SR_Reader.indd 8 03/04/20 8:42 PM

or because of my sheer cluelessness, I kept putting off the

18 I still had not mailed it the day before it was due. At

19 I ended up getting into B.U., with a scholarship, but I still

20 Jeff surprised me with an early graduation present: a trip

21 Before I headed to college, I told Jeff that I would come

22 I have kept in touch with Jeff over the years. We usually

23 Washing dishes for Jeff was grueling, greasy work. But

Student Reader 9 Pre-AP English 1

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Student Reader 11 Pre-AP English 1

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1 Summer break 1985 was defined by my 4:30 a.m. alarm. The