As the holiday season arrives, we’re all looking forward to spending time with our families and friends, giving and getting presents, and having less schoolwork… Right?
Wrong.
For teachers, the winter break is a good time to assign projects to cement material we’ve already learned or to preface a new topic. Personally, the week before break has only just begun and I already have a project in my history class that’s due right after the start of the new year. Right after break, we will do more in-depth research on late 1700s revolutions, and I have impending NHD due dates in…wait…there’s work for Computer Science too?! But I’m just a freshman, I can only imagine what the workload for upperclassmen looks like over break.
Also, has anyone else realized that private schools got out a week before us? It’s almost like they spend a ton of money to have less school.
But that’s not even the point. We all want to relax before what’s probably the longest stretch of the school year: winter. Where, until spring break, we only have a few three-day weekends and have to hope for snow days, which looks less and less likely every year. The winter is also the time when we have big projects and have to bog down on course material before final exams in the spring.
Can you think of where a significant chunk of time must be spent dedicated to the completion of these projects? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not at school. If you also said at home then you must be as tired as I am due to school right now. Nevertheless, teachers probably do have our best interests at heart, not wanting us to forget everything and lose some of the tiny amounts of work ethic that we gained over the fall. But that doesn’t have to stop us from complaining.
However, for those of us who are traveling, despite the fact that it may be annoying, we can probably get our work done on long car rides, flights, train rides, and/or bus rides. And for those at home, although laziness may be tempting, there would also be time to do work. So really, the moral of the story is that whilst we can complain about it, just like all other students throughout history, we will have to do school work when we least want to.
So on behalf of the PolyTechTalk team, we wish you a merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, happy Kwanzaa, and a happy new year. See you in 2023!
By Marshall Civin
