This 2014-2015 school year has Christmas vacation scheduled for Dec. 24 to Jan. 5. All students greatly cherish this holiday vacation, for this is the longest break of the school year, with about two weeks-school free. No homework, no tests, no worries, right? Life is good.
Until this year. When students come back from our break they have the dreaded mid-terms. These tests can either make or break marking period grades. Some teachers do hand-out projects, which is better than having 1000 point tests in every subject. Both mid-term projects and tests are known to ruin the lives of kids who have been doing well in all their classes.
Tests like these have been scheduled for the week students come back from vacation. The principals and school committees scheduled them for the week after a long break when students lose all memory of everything they have learned so far. During Christmas vacation, no one wants to study.
People do make the argument that this gives students more time to study but, why would students study when they have family they never see around? Students actually have time to see families they live with rather than just having parents drive them around and have five minute conversations.
Some subjects are impossible to learn and study for alone. Students even have subjects that can’t be taught by reading, such as math, for most people at least. How will they remember what we are doing if they try and study, but they still don’t understand?
Many teachers are forced to assign homework over the break to try to help students not forget what has been taught. That procedure always ends up in shambles. The grades students get on these papers always ends up helping them fail even more.
The thing is, sometimes students vacation time is even taken up by extra things they take up, such as sports or clubs. So some may not even be able to spend the vacation the way want it to begin with, the extra things they do, take up their lives. These people won’t be able to study, they’re too busy trying to do regular homework and be a well-rounded student.
At the end of this Christmas vacation, students will be coming back to school, unwillingly, with bags packed full of books they barely read and homework barely finished. Students wait to take tests that they aren’t prepared for and finish projects they waited last second to finished.
