Thanksgiving is a time of the year when families come together and have parties, giving presents to family members and spending time with families and friends. For this Thanksgiving Break, students are getting 5 days off, including Saturday and Sunday. This has led to students thinking, why don’t we have the whole week off? In fact, some students are planning not to come to school on Monday and Tuesday.  

There are some excellent reasons to have no school for the whole week, as stated in this article posted to Odyssey. One perfect reason is that after continually working for 12 weeks in school, we are all running low on gas. We all are tired and are running on the last little bits of energy to get these end of the unit project turns in before the break. A more extended break would help us get way more time to relax after the last stretch that gets us all exhausted. Another reason is that most schools don’t account for the travel time to visit relatives. This can be very problematic because we are having to rush the time spent with relatives and extended family to get back to your home to get ready for school and work. With the whole week off, we wouldn’t have to rush and would get to spend more valuable time with family members. Lastly, with all of the events going on, most teachers assign homework over the break. This makes the supposed to be vacation time even more stressful because there will always be the nagging feeling of having homework to do. Most students end up leaving it for the last day or don’t even do it because there is just too much going on.   

To see what GLHS thinks about this topic, we interviewed students Maanas Reddi, Rupak Biswas, Sanjay Swaminathan, Saketh Varanasi, Varun Venna, and Math teacher Mrs. Hatip. All the students have a similar opinion about having a 7 day weekend: it sounded great, but they knew it would mean a trade-off down the road. Reddi said, “I want a seven day weekend, but we already had too many days off, so I would just prefer the 5 day weekend.” Mrs. Hatip said, “ I would love the 7 day weekend because then I can spend more time with my family, but that would affect college schedule and affect the plans for the teacher for quizzes, tests, and assignments.”

We hear what these Gators are saying, but we’d still love to see the longer break. In our opinion, taking the full week to spend more time with family is worth the trade-off. Even though it’s shorter than we’d like, we wish everyone a safe and fantastic Thanksgiving break!

Note from Faculty Advisors: We admire your enthusiasm, fellas, but North Carolina law mandates a certain number of school days per year–AND says that they need to happen between late August and early June. So adding extra days to Thanksgiving Break does indeed mean taking them away from other breaks (which we suspect you might also object to). Maybe you should use some free time during the break to investigate the laws and procedures behind the making of the school calendar to see if you can uncover the reasons for why it’s done this way? Enjoy your time off! 🙂