After four months of school, students and teachers were excited for a much-needed break. Winter break was a time for people to connect with family and friends and take a break from school. In addition, teachers did their best to not assign work over break, as they also wanted to take time off from grading assignments. However, I believe that winter break didn’t give students enough time away from school as they still had schoolwork to do.
As for many of my classes, teachers only assigned work that we had already started in class. This year, it looked like teachers were tired, as were students, so giving students time to finish assignments and other class work was the only work we had over break this year.
Even though we didn’t get any new homework, the work we had to finish added up between all of my classes and it was annoying to have to use winter break to complete the assignments. It was frustrating that we got a two-week break but we still had school work to do. The amount of work I had to do took up time that I could’ve used to slow down and have fun with friends and family, which is what winter break is supposed to be for.
While my teachers tried to avoid assigning homework over break, considering that finals are only a couple of weeks away I wasn’t completely free from studying. The stress of finals approaching made me feel like I needed to start reviewing topics that we learned at the beginning of the year. This didn’t make the break feel as refreshing as I hoped it would be.
Unlike other private schools, BSM waits until after winter break for finals. It’s stressful to wait and think about finals instead of getting them done before break, which would make break stress-free. I think it would be more productive to finish them before break, so not only students but teachers are stress-free and relaxed.
Finally, I think teachers could have done a better job at not assigning so much the week before break so we wouldn’t have had to finish the leftover work during our free time. This was annoying. In addition, many students didn’t do any homework because they wanted to have a stress-free break without school being in the back of their heads, which led to an even higher workload leading up to finals.