BY ISABEL GENECIN

When the students are released on the last day of school before summer break, the last thing that they want to think about is summer work. The summer is supposed to be a fun, relaxing vacation away from school, yet upperclassmen are still given incredible amounts of homework. Though many arguments can be made for the importance of summer work, there should be a limit imposed on the amount of work assigned.

By the time that students are entering their junior and senior years, their summers are often very busy. Drivers Ed, SAT prep courses, summer jobs, academic camps, family vacations, Original Science Research work, sleep away camps—the list of summer activities for high school students continues. In this community especially, students are able to fill up their summers completely and oftentimes don’t have time to relax. And when the summer workload is factored into an already busy schedule, school-related stress can begin before school has even started.

For AP classes, there is a certain amount of work that is required for the class to finish in time for the AP test. But many honors classes also give immense workloads, even though they do not need to teach for a test. Reading chapters in Brinkley or in an AP Biology textbook is understandable, but being assigned an unnecessary amount of work for an honors language class, for example, is excessive.

Students have so much work to do during the year, and they deserve a summer break. Next summer teachers should realize how much pressure extra work puts on students, and perhaps think carefully about the amount of work they assign.