The last few days of summer always have a strange sense of both calm and urgency about them. Impending eight-hour days in the classroom seem almost unimaginable as another day lounging on the beach or on the couch passes by.

That’s what I’ve heard, at least in folklore. Because like a large majority of SHS students, I prefer to save my summer assignments for the last possible moment. SHS students are required to read at least one book over the summer, but students can also have projects for AP and honors courses as well as review packets for foreign languages and math. It’s a sore subject for many a kid who leaves the building in June vowing never to study again and returns in September, arms overflowing with papers and books whose relevance to the class is often minimal.

I understand why schools would want students to refresh their brains by reading more than their Facebook news feeds over the summer. But summer assignments are not a successful way to accomplish this. For the most part, a student who wants to read over the summer will probably read—but it may not be a book on their list of work. Students who don’t feel motivated to read, on the other hand, probably won’t. There will always be a group of students who fails to do their summer work. Don’t we have the liberty to spend our free time as we wish, and fail, if we so choose? Senior Brenda Keys said, “Teachers get a true vacation and we should too because we work so hard and deserve a break every once in a while.”

Classes like math and the foreign languages do wish to refresh students’ knowledge of formulas or grammar after the long summer break, but let’s be honest: Most kids still feel uncomfortable with the previous years’ material for a while at the start of the school year. These packets, usually done in “study groups” or early dawn on the last night of the summer, don’t make anyone feel significantly better about the French verb tense their class rushed through at the end of last spring.

While there is logic associated with having foreign language and math review packets, many other class assignments are simply busy work that is completely unnecessary. The classes who have to identify ten vocabulary words per book chapter are usually not English classes. And where do these pages go after they’re handed in? The work is almost never spoken of again.  The worst occasions are those in which the masterpiece all your sweat and blood spent hours creating is worth only ten or twenty points. Many assignments are extremely time-consuming, but not intellectually valuable or significant during the school year. Wouldn’t most teachers rather not have to correct page after page of boring chapter summaries at the start of September? Another argument for summer work is that it helps schools keep their standardized test scores up and achievement high, but this is no true excuse. If we are placing more importance on test scores than on personal and emotional growth, this argument may have to encompass all of society.

It may be cliché, but summer is the one time of year teens are free to relax. We are completely serious when we say we would rather take a failing grade than spend our precious summer moments analyzing ideas we don’t see a use for in the future. For seniors trying to fit in some last-minute college trips or start their applications, summer work serves as an unnecessary stress that can maim their months of relaxation and reflection. One’s college essay is arguably the most significant piece of work to leave the high school years. Unfortunately, it’s hard to focus on it with several hundred pages of reading hanging over your head.

Summer is a time filled with life experiences that foster social and emotional growth, outside the classroom. The more summer schoolwork a student has, the more time he or she loses to enjoy their summer. Teachers are known to say that being a student is a teen’s full-time job, but often this is not true. Teens who work all summer know that it’s pretty difficult to return from a twelve hour day on the job and crack open a book to be enlightened by Lies My Teacher Told Me.

And with that, I will close my argument. It was nice to take a small break, but I’ve got some summer assignments to finish.