The bell rings and school is out, but it’s out longer than usual this time. You return home and take a deep breath, thinking about all the fun activities you’ll be enjoying this break, taking your time off of school to relax and hang out with friends and family.  Yet for some odd reason, you still think about school. Whether it’s a holiday or a national event, students are given a break from school, and anything that entails less time spent at school puts smiles on the faces of exhausted and sleep-deprived students. Although the main purpose of a break is to relax and get away from school, many students seem to crawl their way back into their textbooks as pencils find their way back into hands.

Many of us see breaks as a time to hang out with our friends, and that’s exactly how we should view it. However, it seems like MVHS students are engulfed in their studies, and while most of our time is spent staring at books, we forget about social skills, another necessity in our life in order to grow up and succeed in any aspect of life. With all the projects and social activities we take part in inside classrooms, it’s crucial that our interactions inside the classroom and at school are not the only form of face-to-face interaction we get with our peers. Breaks are a great time to improve our social skills and spend more time with our friends, building stronger bonds in those relationships.

During the school year, we tend to lose our tight bonds and relationships with our families, and during a break, it’s the perfect time to create more memories with our families. In only a few years, if we choose to go to college, many of us will be far away from home, only visiting our families for a few days over the course of a year. Instead of going back to our textbooks during a break, we should be reconnecting with our families,  going on big trips on vacation or small trips just to spend a single day with our loved ones. As the clock ticks, we should be spending more time with our families now that it is still convenient because our chances will get harder later.

University of Illinois psychology professor Alejandro Lleras shows through an experiment that taking breaks makes people work more efficiently. In the experiment, Lleras divided people into different group randomly and gave them the same computerized task under different conditions. The different conditions included some groups who had to work nonstop for 50-minutes. In the study, the group that worked without any breaks displayed a performance decline, while another group who was told to ask questions every once in a while had performance which stayed sharp. Though the group was tasked to ask questions every once in a while, on a larger scale, this can be compared to working for weeks and being given breaks every once in a while. Similar to these questions, we should be taking the break to relax our brains and not continue to work nonstop, as that is proven to have a performance decline.

This study suggests that we should take the extra time in our breaks to actually relax, because the longer we go without taking a break, the worse our performance will become. According to OnlineSchools.org, “the fact is that not taking regular breaks can lead to a significant decrease in academic performance and, in some cases, serious health concerns like anxiety, insomnia, and depression” (OnlineSchools.org). Breaks are a necessity for not only our work ethic but also for more severe and important parts of our life, including our health. We should be putting our health and social life before our grades, and a simple way to choose that path is to actually make an effort to take regular breaks.

At the same time, if we believe that we are truly behind on our classes, we should be putting in extra time into getting back on track to make our return to school less stressful. In those certain cases, spending break studying is not a fault of our own, but still, we should put our social life and health before our grades, and breaks improve our social skills and create family memories. Events such as goi

ng to the movies or going on hikes with family or friends will allow us to take breaks, and truly relax and have fun. Catching up on sleep can be rejuvenating and lead to greater progress when we return. With all the extra time we are given, it is crucial that we do not end up spending it all back on school again, and instead, we should be spending these breaks with family and friends in order to regain all those hours we lost during school.

As MVHS students, it is normal for us to spend our breaks studying and doing homework. But as students, we’re given these breaks for time to get our mind away from school, which makes no sense when we end up taking this time just to fall back into our school routine. We should be taking this extra time and building our relationships with our families and friends. Not only is spending this time off of books beneficial in social ways, but it is also proven to be healthy, and it actually makes us more productive. As a result, the next time we get home with extra time off school, we should put our books in a pile, and rarely touch them until time for school comes again.