We get Wellness Weekends around four to five times during the school year. Everyone looks forward to a weekend where teachers aren’t allowed to assign homework and aren’t allowed to schedule quizzes on the Monday after a Wellness Weekend. Wellness Weekends are supposed to be a time when students and staff take off of school-related work to spend time with their families and friends or to relax without the stressors of school.

However, many students at Hills are concerned that Wellness Weekends have a contradictory effect. Since Wellness Weekends are a planned event, teachers plan their schedules around it, including when they give homework and quizzes/tests. Because they are not allowed to assign work for that weekend and the Monday after it, they tend to plan a lot of their work right before the Wellness Weekend or the Tuesday after the Wellness Weekend. Since every teacher has that mindset, students are expected to get a lot of homework and quizzes around the same time, either the Thursday or Friday before a Wellness Weekend or the Tuesday afterward. That either causes a lot of stress for students right before a Wellness Weekend or for students who try to prevent a hectic week after a Wellness Weekend, a stressor over the weekend itself, studying for multiple quizzes and homework assignments right after the supposed “relaxing weekend” ends.

Students agree that Wellness Weekends have an opposite effect on them, like Senior Sukjot Singh. “I love the idea of Wellness Weekends and how the administration is thinking about the students, but when it comes down to the teachers, some fail to understand what the purpose of a Wellness Weekend is. Some in fact do a phenomenal job, while other teachers go into the Wellness Weekend with three tests. Or a bunch of assignments that would take at least a day to do but make it due not the day we come back but the next day and it’s so much work that you can’t possibly do it over the “Wellness” Weekend.

It is understandable, however, that teachers have to abide by a curriculum and have a limited amount of time to complete it during the school year, which means that sometimes it is impossible to make it so students don’t have to cram before and/or after a Wellness Weekend. However, students do believe that Wellness Weekends can be almost harmful and have the reverse effect of what it’s supposed to do.