NJ students are #3 in the US for Thanksgiving homework

I’m a firm believer in using the long Thanksgiving weekend as an opportunity to reconnect with family and friends. It’s a time where you can actually take a break from work and school and use your time in the most important way: to connect with people. People get upset when retail stores are open on Thanksgiving. Some people even get irate about it and claim that it is un-American to make people work on the most family-oriented holiday of the year. So why is it that New Jersey teachers assign more homework over that long weekend than in just about every other state? (Oregon and New York are worse).

In a survey by brainly.com, 51% of students say they are given work over the Thanksgiving weekend but 55% say they don’t do it anyway. So what’s the point? Is it just some kind of a power-play? Even the kids who do work over holidays usually cram it in quickly after the holiday festivities are over so their retention of the knowledge would probably suffer.

Why is New Jersey always high on the list of bad things and low on the list of good things? Let’s face it we’re having a hard enough time educating our kids in New Jersey public schools without holding them to unreasonable standards like doing work when they really should be enjoying their families and chilling. It’s time to stop assigning homework during breaks from school.

Here is the state-by-state list of the amount of homework given over the Thanksgiving break.