Students are flooding back into the high school halls after a week-long vacation. Whether they cruised around the Bahamas or stayed here in Wayland, they may find they have one thing in common: their workload.
Many students found themselves burdened with impressive amounts of homework as they left the high school for break, preparing for what should have been a restful vacation. However, some students may have found it hard to relax with immense piles of work hanging over their heads. It doesn’t seem just when teachers exploit vacations, seeing them as a way to squeeze in more work for their students.
While I see the reasoning behind giving a small amount of homework, oftentimes students are expected to read the majority of a book or lengthy packets. Wayland High School is generally known as an academically rigorous high school, and its students work hard all year to keep up their grades, as well as try to balance extracurricular activities. It only seems fair that students should be given a break from all the pressure they’re under and have vacation as a time to enjoy themselves, instead of being burdened with excessive homework.
In addition, the week before vacations are often littered with an assortment of tests, quizzes, and papers. Students should be rewarded for all this hard work prior to vacation, instead of having more handed to them. If students aren’t given vacation to relax, when during the school year do they get a break?
![Seniors Garrett Batt, Tom White, Emmanuel Nzaramba and Jack Calverley work together in preparation for the Spring Fling. “We decided to host this because March is kind of a slow month [in which] there’s not really that much happening, so I just thought it would be fun to put pep back into everyone so people could look forward to something this month,” senior Delcie Peter said.](https://waylandstudentpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Screenshot-2024-03-20-at-10.28.14-PM-1200x832.png)
Matt Whittaker • Feb 23, 2009 at 5:08 PM
I agree that teachers should give homework over break. It took some reflecting on my 3.5 years at WHS to realize that everything the administration and faculty does is to prepare us for higher education. I have friends in college who had to do 20 page papers over breaks, it’s how the world works. Universities don’t give kids a rest because they are preparing you for the real world, where you will rarely get a rest. So while reading 130 pages and posting on Moodle for English along with doing a Chem problem set wasn’t what I wanted to be doing, I know that it’s going to allow me to be fully prepared for next year.
um • Feb 23, 2009 at 12:48 PM
i dont know wat you are talking about… besides reading a book i had no other homework this vacation and my teachers purposely put our units in a special stop for the vacation so that we wouldnt have to do anything…. so yea
2010 • Feb 23, 2009 at 12:31 PM
meg, i agree full heartedly.
over december vacation, i found myself swamped with so many papers that i felt as though my teacher may have destroyed a few acres of the rain forest. a vacation is a vacation, that’s why it is called that.
this same teacher assigned a lot of homework over thanksgiving break, and when our class returned to school, we found out that she had done no work herself. she expected us to do an unbelievable amount of reading and writing, and she didnt even look at the projects we had handed in just before the last day.
my teacher already assigns hours upon hours of work every night, i would just like the break i am entitled to