A revised version of the Vacation Homework Policy was posted on the Stuyvesant Web site on Thursday, November 29. Principal Stanley Teitel added a footnote that states the policy is only “intended for the Winter Recess, Mid-Winter Recess, and Spring Recess.”
This modification excludes Thanksgiving recess. “The truth is there was never a specific agreement on which vacations were included. In my mind, the only vacations that were included were the three vacations that included the week off,” Teitel said. “Nothing was removed.”
The Vacation Homework Policy was implemented last spring. It states teachers “should assign no more written homework than is necessary for the review and retention of prior learning.” Lengthy assignments may be given as long as students are provided with enough time before and after the vacation to complete them.
The Vacation Homework Policy also states teachers may not give assignments requiring students to visit a particular site in New York during a vacation.
Teitel said he has no recollection of any specific discussion about which vacations would be included in the policy.
Junior Sean Gordon-Loebl, who proposed the Vacation Homework Policy last December, said, “I thought [Thanksgiving] was implicit in the phrase holiday break.”
Teitel disagreed. “Are we now going to include Columbus Day weekend too?” he said. “I have to draw the line. The line is week vacations.”
Parents’ Association Co-President Paola De Kock does not support the change in the policy. “The day before Thanksgiving is, I heard, the biggest travel day of the year. The same reasons that people wanted to have no big projects during [Christmas] would apply to Thanksgiving,” she said. “I would have thought it was implicit.”
The exclusion of Thanksgiving in the Vacation Homework Policy had a negative impact on some students’schoolwork. “I had two projects and a paper over Thanksgiving, which was a ridiculous workload,” junior Abraham Lee said. “A break would have been nice.”
“Thanksgiving is a signficant holiday,” junior Dewahar Senthoor said. “I know people go on vacation with their families, so why should the workload be different from that of other breaks?”