It is May 25. It is a Wednesday. But dates do not matter anymore.
The final final is vanquished. The bell tolls for students who Pompeii an ecstatic howl. Freedom; the prospect of sweet summer sweeps the hallways as students surge from nine months of monotonous containment. The asphyxiating air of crammed corridors gives way, if only temporarily, to the welcome warmth of the outside. Everything seems a little bit brighter out there.
Victorious — for now — you drive out of the Stuber lot. Surfin’ USA. Flip flops, window down, and summer breeze. A quick glimpse at nirvana.
You’re home now.
No. Wait…. what? What is The Odyssey doing on your desk?!
The reverie is over.
You have to annotate every third page of Odysseus’ infinite quest: color-coded highlights, dog-eared pages, and the works. Then chase all of that with a (minimum) five-pager on the heroic cycle.
Nothing like summer!
It is a mistake to let the school year infect June and beyond. The school year and summer are meant to be separate entities. Indeed, they should be near antonyms. The American school calendar is designed so that there is a distinction between time to work and time to relax. Neither time should bleed into the other.
We’ve got a good ratio going. But summer work undermines the integrity of this balance.
According to a 2015 CHS Globe survey of nearly 300 students, 97.9 percent consider themselves “generally very busy” during the school year. That considered, shouldn’t students be rewarded with ten weeks of reprieve for nine months of what nearly all Clayton students consider almost overwhelming workloads?
Clayton allows its students to sculpt their own schedules. There is no cap to the number of AP classes a student may take, or limit to the amount extracurriculars in which a student can participate. The autonomy given to students by the administration is, in a sense, honorable. Students are entrusted to be cognizant of their academic capabilities and stamina over a school year. Why should this academic freedom not extend into the summer?
Clayton students as a whole did not benefit from the district’s sloppy attempt in 2012 to introduce a summer math packet. The packet was an endless stream of stapled worksheets compressed into a cerulean cover (the same color as the sky under which Clayton children could have been playing) and there seemed to be no big-picture goal within the district other than for children to drill problems.
Math teachers may counter by saying that work well done is productive, but let’s be realistic: the vast majority of students don’t put effort into solving quadratic equations when they could, and should, be doing something more fun — and especially when the only payoff is a single homework pass or a measly four points out of four in the first quarter grade book.
Somewhere on the world wide web is a cherry-pickable statistic that kids lose 30 percent of their brain mass or something when they don’t have school work over the summer. But we all know that devastating brain damage is not a result of ditching The Odyssey in July. Kids probably actually benefit, if anything, from a brief mental health break over the summer.
It should not only be a priority, but also a responsibility for adults to allow kids to hop off the hamster wheel for a few months in favor of individual exploration.
Vital, more intangible, and potentially equally valuable learning, depending on the person, takes place during these few coveted summer months which, when balanced with knowledge gained during the school year, helps create well-rounded graduates ready to face the “real world.”
Summer work should be abolished because it has the potential to enforce the mental removal of teenagers from moments of play-time during fleeting childhood due to the guilt or remorse one might feel for enjoying herself rather than systematically charting exactly how many pages of a book must be read per day to finish a book on time should be enough to abolish summer school work.
If some claims seem embellished because one single book or one single math packet may not sound like all too much work over the course of ten weeks, consider this. Is a person who is draped in a blanket clutching a mug of earl grey on the couch more relaxed with or without intermittent beeps sounding from the hallway’s busted smoke alarm?
Yes, the summer school work assigned by the Clayton School District is always manageable over the many weeks allotted to complete the assignments, but these prescriptions find a way to nag at students during their period of freedom.
Summer work is like a smoke alarm; not ever-present but somehow still ever-looming, riddled with the sinister capability to take one out of the moment with a single beep, leaving one’s ears ringing and mind racing even when the beep has subsided.
The idea that students should not be able to fully separate school from vacation time is a uniquely American construct. In fact, highly developed Western nations in Europe balk at Americans who do not hop off the hamster wheel. Hard work is venerated in Europe, but fun is taken seriously as well. In England, the holiday is the holiday, and in France les vacances sont les vacances.
In an era in which technology is progressing more quickly than we can comprehend, we must step back and re-negotiate what it means to be human.
Augmented Reality and the Singularity Effect are both expected reach human civilization within the next four decades.
This means a current Clayton student who meets his life expectancy will likely be witness to the day computer games become so advanced that they are indistinguishable from reality, and should be able to, before he dies, essentially upload his consciousness to a piece of hardware.
The most unified American barometer for our students’ success in 2016 is based on which teenagers are able to fill in bubbles with a pencil deemed correct by a machine. Imagine where we will be in the next century as humans become increasingly similar to automatons.
Let’s make an effort to slow the wheel down before it is too late.
Over break, our only job should be to not have one. Simple as a summer breeze.
