For many students, winter break is a relaxing time spent enjoying the holidays and time off after the end of along semester of hard work. Students at other schools don’t have to worry about school as their midterms are generally taken right before break. Wilson students should be able to enjoy a stress-free winter break knowing midterms are over and they can  return to school with a fresh start.

It would be nice if after the advisory ends to have one week of midterms, then go off to winter break like many other students across the district. Instead, we are forced to cram in studying for all eight midterms during the week and few days following the holiday. Seven days of studying for eight midterms isn’t substantial for most, we certainly aren’t  given enough time to fully prepare ourselves.

If we must keep the current midterm schedule, it would be far better to finish up each unit before break, possibly wrapping up the week with a unit test. This way, the week and a half before midterms can be spent reviewing. In reality, what tends to happen is when classes resume after break is that teachers quickly trying to finish the unit they were on or squeeze in a mini-unit, preventing sufficient review time.

The week before midterms is approached differently by different teachers. Some teachers utilize the time to review the material since the beginning of the semester, which is effective as it serves to freshen their memory of the old material. On the other hand, some teachers continue like normal, introducing new material and continuing to teach and assign homework. Although it might be difficult with the DCPS curriculum, teachers should try to steer clear of introducing new subjects the week before midterms because it makes students feel overwhelmed and stressed out. Many cannot handle both workloads on top of each other and cannot fully commit to learning a new topic when they are trying to review the old.

In a perfect world, we would push up midterms to be taken before break. Even if this doesn’t happen, though, there are numerous changes Wilson can implement to make the process more effective for students and teachers.