In 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the fourth Thursday of every November a national day of “thanksgiving and praise,” making Thanksgiving an official national holiday.
In 2007, in the midst of first semester, Principal Stanley Teitel ruined Thanksgiving for Stuyvesant students.
The school policy on vacation homework limits work given over break to the “practice and retention of knowledge,” requires all projects be assigned well before the break and be due well afterwards, and bans all projects that require students to stay in the city during the break.
Last year, this policy was passed as a result of discussions during School Leadership Team meetings.
But on Thursday, November 29, Teitel reissued the vacation homework policy on stuy.edu with an endnote defining the applicable school breaks.
Thanksgiving, noticeably, is absent from the list.
The original policy made no distinction between Winter Recess and Thanksgiving when it referred to “school vacations.” This year, Teitel decided Thanksgiving simply does not make the cut of vacation breaks. This effectively enables teachers to assign as much homework or as many projects as they want over Thanksgiving.
The last thing anyone wants to do on a holiday dedicated to sheer unadulterated engorgement, is coming back early from Uncle Harry’s house to visit an exhibition on conditions in Cambodia during the reign of the Khmer Rouge or reading the entirety of “The Grapes of Wrath” in order to write a paper on the Dust Bowl era.
Teitel’s motivations for such an omission are unclear. I, for one, would not rule out the possibility of some traumatizing experience in Teitel’s childhood, which instilled some great hatred for Thanksgiving. Was Teitel’s Thanksgiving—like Chandler Bing’s from Friends—once marred by the loss of his toe in a plot for revenge gone wrong?
Or perhaps Teitel never got over the time his uncle vomited all over the turkey and stuffing before passing out on top of the dinner table while getting over his recent divorce.
Whatever motives Teitel may have had, it is clear that the impact of this action will be far-reaching.
Next year, as Stuyvesant students everywhere struggle to finish the mountains of mashed potatoes and yams in front of them, they will find themselves obligated to stress about and even possibly work on the mountains of homework that will be due by the first day back.
And on the day after Thanksgiving, which students would normally devote to stretching the capacity of their stomachs by eating inhuman quantities of leftovers from the day before, Stuyvesant students will find themselves struggling through Pre-Calculus problems and writing reports on the Age of Enlightenment.
Not to mention, of course, the greatest crime of all: many families will have to tailor their plans to visit relatives to allow their blossoming children to stand in lines for hours to visit that exhibit in that museum which was absolutely essential to their education.
Come on Teitel, they wrote an article in the New York Times about this policy. Couldn’t you at least wait a while to amend it?
In such a multicultural school as Stuyvesant, no holiday will be celebrated universally. Thanksgiving is devoid of any religious connotation (unlike, for example, Easter/Passover Break), and can be enjoyed by all.
I implore you, Principal Stanley Teitel, to allow your students to celebrate in full, wallow in buckets of gravy and take part in the greatest American tradition without the thought of piles homework hanging over their heads.