Why Monday Off 3-day Weekends Might Not be Such a Good Thing

I remember those Friday afternoons in elementary school right before a holiday and listening to the speaker on the intercom: "Enjoy your three-day weekend!" All of the students including myself would be so excited for having a break. Of course back then workloads were so minimal that it is hard to believe that wanting a break from school would be so prevalent. Even in junior high school and high school I enjoyed holidays, not for the holiday itself but rather for the day off from school. Now I am a senior at a four-year university and I got to say that those short 3-day weekends have lost a lot of the excitement that they once had for me.

One of my favorite quotes that a great high school educator once said is "Vacations are to be vacated." As a result, he would never assign even the slightest degree of homework whenever there was a long weekend. Not only does this motto not only hold true for the average high school class, but it certainly does not extend to college. Many professors would more than happily assign homework throughout winter break if they could. Granted, I have no problem with professors assigning work for these breaks in fact at the college level it is to be expected and appreciated -- after all, college degrees are not cheap. Nonetheless, the problem is the student mindset that gets provoked virtually every time there is some sort of break. Why do something now when there is a three-day weekend? If procrastination is even the slightest problem for college students it amplifies come three-day weekends when the holiday Monday is spent doing the entirety of that weekends work. While sometimes doable, it creates a struggle simply because many college students operate under that mindset that there is no need to do work on say Saturday or Sunday when it can be done on Monday. As a result, the "sanctity" of Sunday night as a day of work gets eliminated because there is now another free day. As a result, it's not that great of a thing to get Mondays off because it reduces student productivity by causing them to postpone work another day. This is particularly bad for students like myself who have a light schedule on Mondays anyways with only one class.