As students across the globe drown in schoolwork, a motivating light shines in the distance: winter break. Winter break, the annual holiday break from school, is regarded as a stress-free, annual period of the year, but is it really a break at all? Winter break is merely a cold week towards the end of the year which gives teachers an opportunity to dump delayed work onto their students’ laps, rendering the “break” component of its label futile.

This year, the week-long holiday period at FLHS was a poor excuse for a winter break, and did not in any way redeem itself to be the promised period of rest and relaxation that we all looked forward to. 

When Gabe Alprin, a current freshman at FLHS was interviewed on his winter break experience this year, he stated that “it was nothing much. Honestly, I couldn’t even relax with the amount of homework I had to do.”

Lucas Richerson, another freshman, agreed, stating that “some teachers didn’t assign homework, but the amount of pressure they put on me to study for midterm exams was enough to fill my break with stress.”

With mid-year assessment exams returning to FLHS this year, students are stressed enough already. Upperclassmen carry an amplified amount of stress with them as they begin to plan their futures beyond high school, and many of them take winter break as a period to sort these plans out. When the school work begins to pile on, these priorities begin to blur. Underclassmen on the other hand, have only just started their high school careers, and do not have a comfortable sense of what the responsibilities that come with being a high schooler really consist of. To pile work onto these students over winter break is impractical, unreasonable, and unrealistic. 

I was assigned three projects at the beginning of break, all from separate classes, which were set to be due on the first returning day at school. Not to mention the additional homework I was assigned from other classes, which conveniently was set to be due on the second returning day.

Enjoying the holidays without having to worry about schoolwork is a right that all students should have. Students are already burdened enough with the juggling of schoolwork, extracurricular activities, and family obligations during the rest of the year, so why carry this stress into the one week out of the entire school year which is designated to be a rest period?