As soon as students begin spring break, they are often forced to make a difficult choice.
Do you take out your homework and bring it with you to trips or family reunions, knowing you’re probably not getting any of it done over that time? Or will you leave it in your backpack to fester until the day before school starts again?
Spring break is for spending time with friends and family. Although there have been many schedule adjustments, like snow days and standardized testing, that changed teachers’ curriculum plans, the solution is not to ask your students to make up those days during their spring break.
It is a free week for students to do whatever they want.
If we feel like we’re behind in school, it’s our right to use spring break time to study.
But doing spring break work should remain a choice and not a requirement. Just because there’s no school going on, it does not mean that students should be expected to spend a beautiful week doing homework.
Unreasonable spring break homework is assigning big projects—for example, presentations, papers, and thick packets—the day before spring break. About thirty minutes of homework, as you would get on any other school day, is fine. An excess of homework is not.
Students do not need to be “on” all of the time. Breaks are vital to upholding students’ mental health. Even when we study, we are supposed to allot ourselves break time—see the Pomodoro technique, which encourages 25-minute study sessions and five-minute breaks in a cycle.
Breaks are crucial to full comprehension of material.
“We greatly underestimate the value of breaks when learning, [neuroscientist Dr. Leonard] Cohen and his colleagues assert, commonly opting for an approach that views active practice as the only way to advance,” an article by Edutopia states. “But that’s a mistake, because incorporating breaks into learning ‘plays just as important a role as practice in learning a new skill. It appears to be the period when our brains compress and consolidate memories of what we just practiced.’”
Too much active learning through homework might stifle other types of learning that are just as important. Even boredom can play a vital role in students’ growth.
As stated in a Forbes article, “Social neuroscientists have found that the brain has a default network mode that is on when we’re disengaged from doing. Boredom can actually foster creative ideas.”
Assigning homework will cast a shadow over students who can’t just get it out of the way on the first day of spring break. Being around the people we love and doing the things we love without academic pressure allows students to breathe. If the shadow of homework is hanging over our interactions, it may have damaging effects.
20 percent of adolescents are experiencing symptoms of anxiety or depression, according to a study from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Spending spring break in our room completing assignments is not going to improve any feelings of isolation.
Make spring break a real break, and let students be kids.
