When spring arrives, students look at the week-long vacation they could use for partying or going to the beach. This is especially true for college students since spring marks the time for them to let loose and drink.

Originally, the break was intended for college swimmers to practice in an Olympic-size swimming pool in Fort Lauderdale in 1936. Take the young adults, add beach and booze to the mix and you get spring break. By the late 1990s, high school students looked for a destination for vacation and tagged along with others and thus began the modern spring break.

However, such breaks are inefficient and a waste of time and resources. The system we have for vacation is outdated and a misuse of the time students are given for rest. A great example of this is summer vacation; the unnecessary long break keeps students away from education and creates an opportunity for them to forget what they have learned.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love having time away from school, so before a mob goes after my head, let me elaborate.

While spring break allows students to prepare for AP testing, in reality, most students spend their time in an unproductive manner and come back dazed. Unless they spent their spring break studying on what they have learned, it will be difficult for them to retain their knowledge. While in school, students adapt to their surroundings and become more academically oriented. They would be more focused in a better environment. I understand that while in school, this would be difficult to do, but the purpose of the classes is to prepare them for tests. In Kerr’s accelerated block schedule, students have almost 90 minutes in their classes. Teachers can provide additional aid to students while they prepare for their test. Although, not all students are taking AP tests, they certainly are not spending their time efficiently either. The purpose of the break is for the students to rest or catch up with their studies; however, they are given too much time that they begin to squander it.

After spring comes summer, a break to which many students and staff look forward. The vacation is considered as a reward but also as a setback; the three-month-long gap has cons that outweigh its pros. Every year, students come back to school with bits and pieces of things they’ve learned in the previous year. The first PAK is then used to review and repair the fragments, which exhaust our resources and time.

Besides, our vacationing system is based on an agrarian society’s calendar. During summer, students were given a long break so they could help out on the farm. However, this description no longer applies our society.

With a long summer break, students can take on summer jobs and attend programs like camp which gives them opportunities to meet new people and gain experience but this further proves my point as students become more academically inactive. With a new system, summer could be shortened to just a month, giving students a chance to get seasonal jobs and internships but also preventing them from being engrossed in them so long that it becomes a disruption in their academic priorities. While the internships and jobs provide career knowledge, school should be their top priority.

I would not want to attend school for the whole year without breaks in-between, and time away from school is much appreciated; but the time we are given is unnecessarily long. If we were to readjust our vacation time and spread it throughout the year, we can effectively allow students to rest while retaining the information they gain. For example, spring break could operate under an every-other-day basis in which students would have Monday, Wednesday, and Friday off and attend school on Tuesday and Thursday. This would accomplish the same goal: it lets the students rest but not to the point where they might forget their study materials.

Times are changing in America. Our vacation calendar should change along with it.