Thank you, Mark Greenfelder.

We actually have the ability to enjoy our time off from school, thanks to your encouraging of teachers embrace the policy of not assigning homework over breaks.

In the past, teachers have used breaks as an opportunity to assign more homework than usual, relying on the assumption that students have nothing better to do with their lives and have the ability to act as robots that need no time to relax. Why would students plan to do anything over break other than homework? After all, homework takes precedence over family, friends, health, and personal happiness.

We enjoyed being allowed to relax over Winter Break without having the ghost of homework looming in the back of our minds. Instead of solving equations or annotating one of “the classics,” we were able to spend time with friends and family, surf the Web, catch up on our favorite television shows, and anything else we would rather do instead of homework.

This popular policy especially benefits those of us who use these breaks to travel. These breaks are ideal times for vacations, since students would not have to miss school and thus not have make-up work. If there was homework over break, students would almost have to endure the same situation as someone who had missed school, since they would have to come back from their trip at the end of break to face whatever homework they have yet to accomplish.

Depending on where students go, they may not have access to the necessary resources, such as the Internet, to complete homework. In addition, some trips are once-in-a-lifetime events that we will look back upon years later. We doubt that students will have pleasant memories of a vacation they spent buried in homework instead of taking in the atmosphere and enjoying the experience of the special location they traveled to. Who needs to visit golden beaches when you can read about angry young boys killing each other on a deserted island?

On the other hand, studious students had the option of working on long term assignments in order to alleviate the avalanche of work that waited to crash on them upon returning from break. As appreciative as we are, some sneaky teachers find ways to skirt around this policy through assigning homework due the day after break. Nevertheless, we recognize that teachers do not intentionally do this to be mean, but to ensure we do not forget anything over the course of the mere eleven days we had off.

Once again, we thank you for instituting the policy of no homework over breaks. Thank you for realizing that even though we are not robots, we need to recharge our batteries.