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Summer Work, is it Necessary?

Anna Burns, Staff Editor

The end of finals week marks the day students of Newtown High School are able to relax without having to worry about school work for another two months. This, however, is not the case for every student.

Students taking Advanced Placement as well as Honors classes are given different types of summer work, whether it is reading a book, annotating two books in addition to reading two other books, or reading chapters from a textbook and taking notes. The amount of work can start to pile up for students taking multiple classes that give summer assignments.

“I think the summer work is slightly overwhelming, but I also signed up for three APs with the most summer work, so it is something students may want to consider themselves,” NHS junior Mary Celentano said.

Students may choose to opt out of specific classes due to the summer assignments given. These students may get overwhelmed with the amount of assignments they are given and decide to drop down a class level. Some students also drop a class with summer assignments because they simply do not want to complete the work.

“Giving a little summer work weeds out some kids that might think it’s a great idea at the time but then decide not to go through with it. There are probably five or six people who dropped out over the course of the summer. It makes sure that people are ready for the level of commitment,” NHS AP American History teacher David Foss said.

Teachers do not give students summer work as a punishment, but as a way to see who wants to be in the class and will do their work well. AP classes are more likely to give summer work because with AP tests being held in May, there is a lot of information to cover in nine months.

“I first started giving it because I was really worried about making it through the whole course, because there’s so much content that I wanted to get a head start so that we could quickly finish the first four chapters,” Foss said.

The teachers giving summer assignments to their incoming students do so to manage class time effectively and teacher the material that is important for students to learn for upcoming tests. Students, however, do not always see the benefits to these assignments.

“Sometimes it seems that it doesn’t have a lot of relation to what we’re doing in class. The summer work should be a reflection of what class work will be like,” NHS junior Rick Irving said.

Students like Irving prefer to be doing work that will be relevant to the class giving the summer work. When the assignments start to pile up, students such as Irving and Celentano start to feel like they are completing busy work.

“I think annotating one book would suffice, and it took me forever to annotate the long nonfiction book compared to all of my other summer work,” Celentano said.

For many students, summer assignments get in the way of enjoying a break from school, and become a hassle to finish. Students such as Irving complete their assignments only to start up the next one.

“I wouldn’t say I enjoyed anything other than the satisfaction of getting things checked off the list,” Irving said.

Students cannot stop teachers from assigning summer work, but they do not always need to take the classes giving out summer assignments. Teachers could also become open to suggestions and feedback from students about their summer work to make the load a little more bearable.

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