*Background information: After reading Alice Walker’s short story, The Flowers, students in Ms. Waterman’s AP Language & Composition class were assigned to write about a memorable moment when they realized that their childhood was over. This is Kate Dilworth’s “And The Summer Was Over” essay entitled, Ballet-Slipper Pink.
-Photo credit: Kate Dilworth ’25
My grandparents had three sons, my father being the oldest. My father was thirty-one when he met my mother who was twenty-six at the time; Nine years later they got married and had me. When I was five I couldn’t wait to turn seven, at seven I couldn’t wait to turn ten. I couldn’t wait to grow up. At five I couldn’t understand the concept of death. I knew my parents would never leave me, and I would always go to sleep in my ballet-slipper pink room, with my parents asleep just on the other side of the wall. My parents would never leave me, they would always be just beyond the pink.
As my wish came true and I turned fifteen, I realized that not only had I grown up but so did my parents. Over the ten years of my wish for maturity, my parents’ skin wrinkled, and their jet-black hair became sprinkled with salt. One day my mother would have me sit down next to her on the guest bed of my grandparents’ house two days after Christmas. Then she would ever so calmly tell me my father had prostate cancer. But it was so small I shouldn’t have to worry. He would stay on top of it.
I had been to countless funerals. Death was simply something that happened. I would put on a nice dress, ride in a silent car with my parents, and sit in a still church. The priest would say a few words, and the family would read their tear-stained speeches about their husband, brother, or son. Yet I had never been to the funeral of someone I truly knew, I couldn’t mourn the hole in my heart if it was never there to begin with.
At sixteen I am sitting on the couch two weeks before the start of junior year. My father sits next to me. When I look at his face, I notice something. I have his eyes, his nose, the same straight black hair. I spent my entire life viewing him as immortal, the never-ending fire in his brain would never burn out. It’s what made him my father. Yet, he has to have surgery, they have to remove the prostate before the cancer spreads further. I remember the moment, I remember hearing only pure silence, I remember the feeling of my mother watching and listening from the kitchen island, my father’s face, his eyes, my eyes, our eyes looking at me, waiting for a reaction. I saw my parents as regular men and women, and I, the perfect mix of both.
I went to bed that night in my room, the one next to my parents, but my ballet-slipper pink walls were painted white.
*Background information: After reading Alice Walker’s short story, The Flowers, students in Ms. Waterman’s AP Language & Composition class were assigned to write about a memorable moment when they realized that their childhood was over. This is Tessa Sweeney’s “And The Summer Was Over” essay entitled, Double Digits.
I was nine years old, two months short of turning ten, waiting for my mother to finish up s’mores in the backyard of our refurbished 1990s home when the sirens started blaring. The fire was beginning to make me sweat. The sticky June weather along with the warmth from the fire made me queasy. The police cars’ sirens rang through my ears as one after the other passed my house. The fence was too high for me to see over, but just as I was scooting a rock from the garden over, my father ordered me to go inside.
My family rushed inside, fumbling for the remote to the TV. I sat down on our brown corduroy couch, s’more in hand. The marshmallow dripped down the side of my hand as I brought my mouth up to clean up the mess. I looked around at the artwork on the walls, bright abstract faces with white frames. There were old family photos from when I was a baby. A picture of me playing with an old, passed-down baby doll with its blonde hair in two pigtails, tied with a pink ribbon. My hair, not much darker than hers, was pulled back similarly.
I had come home from a playdate at a friend’s house about an hour earlier. Reminiscing now, I realize just how surreal this experience would have been for a young girl with a distorted sense of reality. We played horses that afternoon, Grace and I. We were the stablehands and her plastic toy horses galloped across the green carpet. All we cared about was if one of the horses was talented enough to win the race to the living room downstairs, not when or if our parents were going to pick us up.
The TV flickered on and my father quickly turned the channel to the news. My whole family sat eagerly as the news anchor pointed out the sweltering weather that was going to burden us for the rest of the week. It took half an hour for the news station to even report what was happening, that’s how close it must’ve been to our home. We were witnessing it in real time.
I recall getting up from the couch to throw away the paper towel that I had held my s’more with when suddenly the flashing lights from earlier appeared behind the news anchor on the TV.
Seven dead, many wounded.
I had never heard of Columbine High School or Sandy Hook until that night. It wasn’t as if my parents tried to hide these things from me, rather they just never came up in conversation. The death toll kept rising throughout the night. My siblings had gone to bed, but my body never left that couch. It wasn’t until the number hit double digits that my heart began to beat like a drum inside my chest. That night I went to bed thinking of the people who would never hug their mom again. I went to bed thinking of the people who would never see the sunrise; whose fingers would never be sticky with s’more once more.
I woke up in pain for those lives that were lost that night. June is supposed to be a celebration of summer and individuality. That June was a fever dream, the haziness of the fog in my brain cleared. I barely played with plastic horses anymore. I began to wonder why the world is so cruel to the innocent. I still find myself looking at pictures of those we lost years ago.
I was a kid drowning in a sea of grief for people I had never even met.
*Background information: After reading Alice Walker’s short story, The Flowers, students in Ms. Waterman’s AP Language & Composition class were assigned to write about a memorable moment when they realized that their childhood was over. This is Evan Miller’s “And The Summer Was Over” essay entitled, The Next Chapter of My Life.
-Photo credit: Blake Tripp ’24
Since I was little, I had always dreamed of going to a prep school to play hockey in turn helping me get one step closer to my dream. One of my teammate’s parents had talked to my parents about a showcase called the Pre-Prep Showcase. It was a hockey showcase where some of the most talented kids in the world came to get scouted by schools. It was August of 2019, my family and I hit the road for a trip to Boston. The trip was as boring as watching paint dry. When we finally got to Boston, the whole trip changed.
The practice was first thing in the morning. I stepped on the ice and skated around for a bit then, I got in the net, and BANG! The first shot hits me right dead center in the mask. I could smell the rubber from the puck as if someone had lit it on fire right under my nose. After we finished practice, the team headed back to the hotel. We had a team dinner and then we were right back at it on the ice for our first game. We played well and ended up winning.
The next day we had two more games, which we also won. After our final game, we went to a gathering where we met with all the coaches from different schools. Over the next school year, I looked into the different prep schools in New England. Everything was going well until March of 2020. And then Covid happened.
Covid had shut everything down and I was stuck at home. This might have been the best possible thing for me. Since I was bored at home all day, I started working out regularly and got into better shape. With this new free time, I started reaching out to coaches from different prep schools. One of the coaches who responded was Coach O’Brien. We had an interview and the coach was looking forward to meeting me in person.
Eventually, COVID had slowed down a bit and My parents and I decided to muster the courage to go on the seven-hour drive to Maine. It was even worse than the ride to Boston. Once we got there we explored the campus with the coach seeing all the different buildings. I was nervous but excited at the same time. After the tour, I knew this was where I wanted to be during the next chapter of my life. Going off on my own at fifteen was a huge decision though. My parents both excited and scared, knew that this would be what was best for me. Over that summer, my mom and I started packing up all my stuff. It was the end of summer 2021 when we took the first drive that would start the rest of my life. We finally got to campus and got the car unpacked, my room was ready and so was I. So I said my goodbyes and settled in my new room. The first few days passed before the first day of school. We went on a bunch of trips including mini golf and a hike. When the first day finally arrived I got ready, and walked out of my dorm.
Explanation: A couple weeks ago, after powering through yet another mediocre romance novel, I once again heard the distant, tiny whisper in the back of my mind: You could write a book yourself, you know. You’ve done it before. You can do it again. After all, I was enjoying my first summer off since I was 15 years old, reveling in the endless stretches of time. Why not try to write a fantasy novel? Why not? What follows is the brief, half-baked result of an hour of feverish late-night brainstorming and writing powered entirely by Pepsi.
Disoriented, perhaps. Out of sorts, certainly. Lost, however, was out of the question.
Because being lost is a kind of hopelessness, and if she succumbed to hopelessness, she knew she would sink to the damp earth beneath her, pull her knees close and her eyes shut, and wait for the inevitability of time to blow her away on an errant breeze.
No. She was not lost. Eventually, if she ran in a straight line for long enough, she would happen upon a town, and with any luck—which, she reasoned, she was due any day now—that town would help orient her, a pin in her hazy mental map of Ceris.
And so Laurel continued to run in what she hoped was a straight line, the oppressive dark of the forest under a new moon blurring the landscape. Briars drew wicked nails across her exposed shins as she stumbled on, and tree branches lunged from the blackness to slash her face. She could feel every stone through the wafer-thin soles of her shoes, and the little toe on her left foot had worn through. If it got much colder, she feared she could lose it.
But she couldn’t think about that now. Now, she needed to put as much distance as possible between herself and the prison wagon on the main road. She was certain the prince’s guards would have noticed her absence by now, and it was only a matter of time before a small group was sent after her.
Laurel absolutely could not have suffered a single second more in that rumbling, stinking, overflowing dungheap on wheels. In the darkness of the wagon, she had endured a woman wailing for mercy to guards struck suddenly deaf; she had felt the grimy creep of a hand snaking along her calf; she had smelled the rank of rotting and infected flesh, perhaps her own among it. She hadn’t had time to evaluate her injuries before her failed escape from the palace, and though the heat in her arms could have been from the press of bodies in that overcrowded box of a wagon, it seemed just as likely that the wounds skittering up and down her arms were corrupted with disease.
The third night in the prison wagon, one of the horses had thrown a shoe in the muddy road and they were forced to stop. The wailing woman began pounding her fists on the walls of the wagon, pleading that if the guards would only listen to her, they would understand. Laurel felt the wagon shift as one of the guards jumped down, rounded to the back, and ripped the door open. She could see only silhouettes, but it seemed that everyone froze as the guard hauled himself up inside. The woman’s shrieking quieted to earnest whimpering, but still the guard said nothing as he slowly and deliberately made his way back to her. The air was heavy and thick, like trying to breathe under the blankets. Laurel realized the man’s intent the split second before he acted, but she—and all the other prisoners alongside her—was powerless to act as the man grabbed the crying woman by the neck, reared her head back, and slammed it once, twice, three times into the wall of the wagon.
“Enough! Whining!” he bellowed, his echoes reverberating endlessly through the small confines.
A familiar rage had bubbled up inside Laurel at that moment—rage that a woman would be treated so callously and violently, rage that they were seen as no more than unruly dogs in need of punishment, rage at her own stupidity for landing her in this position in the first place—and it trickled down her scalp and neck like icy water. She dropped her head, eyes squeezed shut against her lot. When she opened them, however, and saw how her hands now appeared as little more than wisps on a breeze, she realized with a jolt of surprise that perhaps her luck had not run out quite yet after all. Within seconds, she had a plan. In retrospect, it was less of a plan and more of a final desperate act, but it had to be better than merely accepting her lot.
Laurel watched as the guard unceremoniously dropped the (hopefully) unconscious woman in a heap and stalked back past her. Slowly, agonizingly carefully, she rose from her seat, clutching her manacles to her chest to keep them silent, and followed his steps out of the wagon. While he jumped down, she slipped down gently in front of him before he could close the doors again, her figure a mere shadow across the door. Unsure how long her luck would hold this time and unwilling to test it with a dead sprint into the treeline, she dropped to her knees, crawled under the wagon, and laid silently on her back, waiting with eyes clenched tightly shut for it to pull away. She had not heard any of the other prisoners speculating about her sudden absence, for which she was grateful, though she doubted it was out of solidarity and more out of shock and fear.
It could have been hours or mere minutes, or perhaps a great many eternities, but finally the wagon began to lurch off, without her.
This June, I traveled to Hawaii with my family for my sister’s graduation trip. I was there for almost two weeks and got to see many incredible views. This first photo was taken during sunset from my resort balcony in Kaanapali, Maui, Hawaii.
-Photo credit: Belle Beauchesne ’25
This second photo was also taken during sunset from the beach on the resort in Kaanapali, Maui, Hawaii. Waking up early to see the sunrise and staying out late to see the sunset were two of my favorite things to do when I was in Hawaii. My family and I also did many activities during our stay, including horseback riding, snorkeling, visiting Oahu for a day, exploring the ocean wildlife around Molokini Island, attending a traditional Hawaiin luau, and going to a variety of beaches.
-Photo credit: Belle Beauchesne ’25
Along with taking in the breathtaking views Hawaii had to offer, I tried to take advantage of the beauty in the Hawaiian wildlife and greenery around me. This photo was taken on the resort’s property in Kaanapali, Maui, Hawaii, and it is of a pink plumeria flower. My resort had a bunch of plumeria flowers all over the resort’s outside property. Besides the pink version of the plumeria flower shown above, I saw some in white and yellow as well.
-Photo credit: Belle Beauchesne ‘25
This last photo was taken in Wailea-Makena, Maui, Hawaii, on a beach on the side of the road. In Hawaii, all beaches are considered public property, so anyone can go to any beach-resembling area (I say beach-resembling area because not all areas are declared official beaches) for free. This photo was taken as the sun was setting and is one of my favorites because it shows a beautiful view of both the ocean and the sky.
I’ve stayed in Maine mostly, but I’ve had a summer job at Papoose Pond Family Campground & Cabins as a camp counselor. I’ve had such great experiences with other counselors and made so many new friends because of it.
I went to Florida in June and had many fun experiences, including going to the beach, watching multiple rocket launches, and, as shown here, kayaking through cocoa beach mangroves, where I saw manatees and other wildlife.
When December approaches and the snow begins to gather on the sidewalks, footprints slowly brush away the thin layer of powder covering the pavements. The trees dance with the wind as well as the snowflakes as they glide down from the sky and onto my hands, nose, and mouth. I open my mouth wide and stick my tongue out in hopes of catching a snowflake dissolve on my tongue, but it tastes like nothing; I barely sense it as it lands in my mouth. I walk through the door and stomp up the five flights of stairs to my apartment. I open the door and immediately glance at my reflection in the mirror in the entry arch. My lips, nose, and hands are reddened by the cold. I rip the knit hat off my head and unravel the scarf from my neck as I smell an aroma coming from the kitchen. I take a deep breath, and my heart begins to warm up to a scent of nutty vanilla, sweetness and melted chocolate. I walk into the kitchen and there is my mom. She has the big wooden board out for making cookies and the flour and powdered sugar frost the front of her apron as well as spread around the air like the snow that I was trying to grasp. I feel no need to ask her what she is making as it is a tradition to make this Czech pastry every approaching Christmas; I am merely upset that she started without me. I tell her to wait a few more minutes so that I can get into my Christmas pajamas and I can grab the white tiger toy I had been gifted for my birthday that year just a few days beforehand. My pajamas are red with white snowflakes; I open my drawer and find my red socks with a three-dimensional Christmas penguin that sits right on the top of my foot. I hurry to the kitchen and start grabbing every ingredient off the shelves and the refrigerator.
My mom takes out the food mixer and grinds the walnuts into a thick powder that resembles the snow and dirt which accumulates along the sides of the roads. She then takes out the big glass boll that is only for baking and adds the flower which trickles from the packaging like fine snowflakes of the first snow. Just the egg yolks are next, then the sugar and room-temperature butter. She mixes the ground walnuts and mixes, mixes, and mixes the dough until it is solid. I take a sip of my hot cocoa and spread flour on the wooden board and all on the surface of my hands. I clap my hands in my mom’s face and the flower spreads all over the kitchen floor and her hair. She briefly gives me a lesson about cleaning up my mess but I cannot help myself but laugh; the flour on her hair looks like powdery white flakes which coat her hair during heavy snowfall. We roll the dough into a large cylinder on the wooden board and put it back into the bowl to let it solidify in the fridge. I run through my apartment into the living room where my dad is reading the newspaper and watching the news. I grab the remote and change it to a Christmas movie, Polar Express, I sit and watch the animated characters until my mother calls me into the kitchen to finish baking.
The dough comes out of the fridge it looks hard and cold. I take it out of the boll carefully and use a string to cut slices out of the cylinder. Then I roll each slice into a thinner roll and again cut each roll further into smaller pieces. I shape each small peace into a half-moon shape and repeat that over and over with each little roll. When all the cookies are shaped I line them up on a tray and set the temperature of the oven to one-hundred-and-seventy degrees Celsius. I wait for the oven to get warm and I press my hands on the glass of the oven to simultaneously warm up my hands. I grab the tray carefully and slip it in the oven for twelve minutes. I watch the cookies slowly bake and turn darker. The aroma of walnuts and vanilla refills the house; it feels like Christmas. The oven dings and I snap out of my hypnosis of watching the cookies bake. I grasp the oven mitt and slide the cookies out of the oven. My mom warns me that I have to dunk the cookies in powdered sugar while they are still hot to help it stick better to the surface of the cookie. So, occasionally burning my fingers I coat each crescent-shaped cookie with powdered sugar and lay them down in a serving bowl.
This time is highly anticipated by my sister and father, they can finally taste the white sugar-frosted crescent cookies. They taste just the way they smell: nutty, vanilla-flavored, sweet, and crunchy. They reach in for one before dinner, one after, then one before going to bed as a late-night snack, and one for breakfast the next day until they are all gone. The more the cookies disappear from the bowl the more and more snow covers the streets until it is finally a white Christmas.
Vanilkove Rohliky Recipe
INGREDIENTS
▢ 2 cups (260 g) all-purpose flour
▢ 1 and ½ stick (170 g) unsalted butter
▢ ¼ cup (50 g) coarse sugar
▢ 1 cup (100 g) walnuts shelled
▢1 egg yolk
INSTRUCTIONS
Grate the walnuts and put them in a bowl.
Add the flour, egg yolk, sugar and butter cut into pieces.
Work into a smooth dough. Wrap the dough in cling film and put it in the fridge to rest for an hour.
Divide the dough into four pieces, roll each into a strand about 1 inch (2.5 cm) thick. Cut the strand into small, equal-sized pieces.
Roll the pieces of dough into crescent shapes and place them on a baking sheet lined with baking paper.
Bake in a preheated oven at 340 °f (170 °C) for 12 minutes.
Roll the crescents while still warm in vanilla sugar
The sun had barely peaked over the horizon before the boy was in line. Even at this hour, he loosely estimated thirty bodies ahead of him and more coming to stand behind him every minute. He could not see the sunrise, for the buildings lining the market covered the horizon. Looking up, he saw the trace of a few bright stars valiantly pressing themselves through the violet sky. His gaze fell down to the back of the head in front of him and a tired, thoughtless trance overtook him. He waited and waited; eyes as blank and unmoving as the line he was in. The morning wind pushed his bushy hair to the side and ran through his t-shirt. He blinked and shuffled his feet in their sandals, arousing his first coherent thought of the day: at least it will be dry today.
As the sky faded into its usual azure, the line started to move. Slowly, the boy shuffled his way to the front. “Siguiente!”
He looked side to side as the market filled; women in loosely fitted shirts with woven baskets hurried from shop to shop and children chased each other through the street. “Siguiente!”
As if charged by the sunrise, the buzz of conversation in the market rose; store owners began to yell out their prices, shoppers cried out in greeting to each other, dogs yapped and whined for scraps. “Siguiente!”
The boy came face to face with a short man with graying hair in a plain white shirt. He had his hands laid out on a bare wooden table.
“Uno”. The boy said.
The man reached down into a cart and pulled out a small, translucent jar containing a dark substance. He set it on the table with an eyebrow raised.
The boy took a bill out of his cargo pants and slapped it on the table, scooping the jar with the same hand and already turning to leave.
“Dos mas, chico”. The man said, unimpressed with the bill.
Stupefied by the price increase, the boy hesitated before turning around to plead. The line behind him groaned angrily.
“No mas”. The boy said, turning his pockets inside out. “Por mi abuela, señor.”
The man sized him up.
“Por favor?” The boy added with an inflection.
The man cocked his chin. “Siguiente!”
The boy wheeled around and started off through the bustling streets. He secured the jar in his shorts and dodged through the crowds of chattering shoppers. Towards the end of the street, he ducked into an alleyway and continued his hurried pace.
Down the narrow alley, sidestepping trash cans and broken furniture, he noisily splashed through the puddles of dirty water left over from the previous week’s rain. Heading away from the coast, his back to the rising sun, the boy zig-zagged through streets and alleyways as if navigating a maze to which he knew the exact path.
Finally, without warning, he ducked his way into a bulkhead entrance of one of the many indistinguishable three-story tenant buildings which lined every street. Reaching the door at the bottom of the steps, he banged loudly on the damp, wooden door. As his feet soaked in the same dirty water he experienced in the alleyways, he breathed heavily, his chest heaving his thin t-shirt up and down. The bags under his eyes willed the door to open. He banged on the door again. Someone from within unlocked the door without opening it. The boy pushed it open and stumbled through the doorway into a dimly lit kitchen.
A cacophony of hushed whispers, clinking pots, and creaky fans greeted him. Two women, one middle-aged, the other significantly younger, flurried around the kitchen. They both shared his tan complexion, dark hair, and green eyes. They talked excitedly in murmurs and whispers, fussing amongst chipped, open cabinets. On the counter next to a dilapidated oven, was a single pan full of sugar. In a bowl next to the pan, there was what looked to be several raw eggs.
The boy made his way through the clutter of clothes on either side of the doorway towards the counter. He took the jar out of his shorts and set it on the counter with no acknowledgment from the women. He then sat on the table in the middle of the room and folded his arms, hunching his back to observe them.
The older woman took the jar, holding it up to the single light hanging over the counter, and eyed it. She then took a spoon and carefully measured two scoops of the liquid, pouring them into the bowl. The younger woman began to whisk the bowl, pouring it into the pan after a few minutes. She opened up the oven where a large deep dish, half filled with water, sat. She carefully placed the pan into the dish and closed the oven.
The older woman left through a side door to an adjacent room while the younger one began to clean up. The boy still waited on the table, his faraway, sleepy trance returning. His eyelids drooped and he faded in and out of a shallow sleep. The closing of cabinets and clinking of cutlery stirred him periodically until a sharp nudge fully aroused him.
He stretched and yawned as the younger woman opened the door to the adjoining room. She carried with her a small plate with what looked like a slice of cake with melted butter on top. The smell in the kitchen was distinctly different, the warm scent of caramel made his mouth water and stomach growl. He quickly followed the woman into the next room.
Same as the entrance and kitchen, the room was full of clutter. Clothes and boxes were strewn about the floor. Framed pictures lined the shelves. In the corner next to a high window, someone lay in a bed. The older woman sat on the chair next to the figure and the younger stood holding the plate looking down at the figure in the bed. The boy stood by the latter and the figure stirred at the scent of the plate.
“Ahh”. Frail hands reached up for the plate. The older woman helped a clearly elderly lady sit up in bed. Rays of sunlight penetrating the blinds on the window reflected off of white hair. The tired lady held the plate up to her nose, breathing as deep as her shallow lungs allowed.
“Ahh.” She sighed again in her raspy voice. She took a spoon and scooped part of the cake-like pastry into her mouth.
“Mm-mm-mmm.” A smile tugged her lined face. Sparkling eyes found the boy. She set the plate in her lap and reached a hand out toward him. The boy knelt closer to her. Her warm hand caressed his face.
At Hebron Academy, our students are plagued with excessive amounts of work. According to onlinedegrees.sandiego.edu, “Excessive homework is associated with high-stress levels, physical health problems, and lack of balance in children’s lives.” This is because of how much time and energy a large amount of homework takes out of a student’s home life. On weekdays, school starts at 8:30 and ends at 5:00 (including after-school activities because they are a requirement at Hebron). That is 8 hours and 30 minutes of school each day. In comparison, the average amount of school in Maine is about 6 hours and 47 minutes. Adding homework on top of those extra hours doesn’t help the mental health of the students. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, belonging and love are the third most important category of needs. When a student only has roughly an hour and a half to socialize on a weekday, it makes it more difficult to achieve the deep connections that humans need when most of our students, especially when they live so far away from their parents which are often where a child obtains most of their emotional support and security. With all of these in mind, I propose three different solutions.
First, we can start shifting our curriculum to be more project-based. Even though this would include a lot of changes and planning, this method has been proven to improve the learning of students. According to nwcommons.nwciowa.edu, “The students who participated in the PBL on the rock unit were much more engaged through the 19 days of instruction, than the students who were taught with a more traditional approach.” Because the students using PBL were more engaged, they likely learned more. We can decrease homework by making each project take about a week to complete as well as having students work on those projects in and out of class instead of just assigning homework.
Second, we can decrease our school hours. This can help both the problems that I have listed AND a completely different problem, sports trips. Many students have to travel VERY far in order to play against other schools. This leads them to miss many important classes and assignments on top of the homework that they are already given. If we decrease our school days to ending at 2:00 pm or 2:30 pm, students will have more time to do their homework and the students who are participating in sports will miss fewer classes.
Third, reducing summer reading to two books that the student/s chose at most. This is because according to katiecouric.com, claims that adults ages 18 to 34 read about 13 books a year on average which they likely choose for themselves. If a student gets more than 3 to 4 books over the summer, that would be the average for an adult that (again) likely chose those books. According to scholastic.com, teenagers ages 15 to 17 read about 2 books per summer which give kids enough time to read the books they are given while also having the time to read the books they genuinely enjoy. One may wonder what is bad about having more books, they are good for kids after all. But what if the problem wasn’t just the fact that there are books needed to read, but there are also problems with boundaries. According to charityjob.co.uk, “Separating your work and personal life not only increases efficiency at work, but it also reduces stress in your personal life. Both of these mean more relaxation and less burnout.” This can be applied to school life as well. Their break will be less stressful and they will be ready for the next school year.
Lastly, you can just do all of them. This way, you can get the best of both worlds. One of the things that I learned this year was that our brains often associate certain spaces, smells, and tastes with certain emotions, memories, etc. When a boarding student at Hebron comes back from their summer vacation, the classroom is associated with schoolwork, getting students in the proper headspace for work which is a good thing. However, when we give students an excessive amount of homework, their dorm rooms become associated with schoolwork, making it harder to wind down and feel comfortable. When we extend that work to their homes, they feel less like they are allowed to take a break. This often feels invasive in a student’s downtime, why even call it “after school“ when you are constantly doing schoolwork? If we as a community give students a healthy amount of downtime at the very least, we can change this school for the better.
Annotated Bibliography as Required by the Institution for Publication:
Lathan, Joseph “Is Homework Necessary? Education Inequity and Its Impact on Students” onlinedegrees.sandiego
This article explains the benefits of homework as well as its flaws. It states that homework can be beneficial because it teaches students important lessons like time management, but too much can cause students an unnecessary amount of stress and can take over a student’s life. I used this article in order to explain why having a small amount of homework is better for students’ home/dorm lives.
Deitering, Sara “Is Project Based Learning a More Effective Way of Teaching Than Traditional Teaching?” Northwestern College, 2016
This article reinforces my claim that students benefit more from project-based learning. It uses evidence from an experiment to attempt to answer this very question and it showed that it kept the students’ attention span longer when given hands-on activities and/or when told to design or create something.
“A SUMMER READING AWARENESS GAP FOR PARENTS” Scholastic.com
Unlike the two previous articles, I used this one to merely learn the average amount of books read by teenagers. Keep in mind, the reading level and length of the books aren’t included in the statistics as well as the fact that teenagers 14 and older sometimes have jobs and/or go to summer camps during the summer which may be the reason why 15 to 18-year-olds read significantly less than students 14 and younger.
Price, David “Why it’s Important to Keep Your Work and Home Life Separate” Charityjob, 3/20/2023
Even though this article focuses on jobs, it can be extended to school life because of the similarities in workloads to an average office job. It explains that keeping your work and home life as separate as possible is important and people need to be able to set those boundaries.
