Sorry teachers, but no kid really “jumps for joy” on the last day of school when you tell them to check the Paint Branch website for their summer assignments. What teachers hope is that kids evenly space out their assignments over summer break – maybe do the math at the end of June, reading in mid-July, and history in the beginning of August.

The reality of the situation, though, is that students don’t even consider those assignments until the week before school starts.

The point of summer work is to keep students’ brains “flowing” throughout the 10 weeks we spend away from school.  What ends up happening to many students, however, is temporal discounting – or in simpler terms, procrastination. The further away the reward, like a 100% on an assignment that’s not due until September, the more you undermine its value. Even if we’re not busy, our minds convince us that “we have time” and “it can wait.”  Ultimately, we do the assignments without much effort, or we finish them quickly without much concern for content, and, let’s face it, many students cheat. The assignment turns into “hey, can you send me pictures of your work?” and “I’ll pay someone $20 to do my summer reading.” Mrs. McGrath, who teaches AP Calculus and Geometry, shares, “I think that, even if you wait and do it the night before, which teachers are well aware that you do, it definitely helps get your brain refreshed and at least puts that material in the forefront of students’ minds.”

While the work does effectively prepare us to come back to school, that doesn’t mean that our summer vacations should be bogged down by it. Senior Alex Johny argues, “I’d be much more compelled to do my work throughout the summer if I wasn’t dreading literary journals for The Kite Runner just to prove that I read it or 40 similar math problems just with different numbers.”