“In the last several years, your school may have developed a “vacation problem,” as a colleague of mine recently put it. A “vacation problem” is a tendency among school families to take long vacations in the middle of the school year. Your school may have had vacation issues prior to 2020, but pandemic policies inevitably led many families to take a much looser stance toward school attendance. For the last two years, many in-person classes were also available online, which meant a time share in Florida was just as likely as a positive COVID test to make a student absent for a week. While online options have ended, many families are still willing to take extended vacations in the middle of the school year and assume students can just get makeup work upon their return. The truth is quite a bit more complicated, though.
If a student misses five days of class to go to the Bahamas, why should a teacher give up several hours of their own time to help that student upon their return?”
-from The Vacation Problem, my latest for CiRCE
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. 