I'm a big proponent of year-round schooling and this is why.

With most students around the country heading back to school this week or next, gripes are already surfacing about assigned summer homework. And get this, the parents are complaining too! The AP reports,

Summer homework has increasingly become a popular tool used by teachers to bridge the gap between the end of one school year and the start of another. But some parents worry that the workload is making summer fun slip away.

"I don't know what good this really does," said Sheryl Preiss, a Baltimore, Maryland, mother parent of twin 13-year-old girls entering high school this year. "Life isn't always about a test. I think it's important for children to be children, to be well-rounded.

For me, school meant life in the homework inferno. Private schools have absolutely no mercy when it comes to piling it on. By the time I got to high school, I easily had five hours worth of homework every night. There was almost never a time when we came from under the burden of repetitive assignments. I still have gripes about the intensity of private school workload, but for what it's worth, it gave me a great work ethic and the summer was indeed a welcomed break.

Unfortunately, these days the worse lot of public schools don't give nearly enough homework if you ask me. I know many parents who actually supplement their children's workload with additional materials just to fill in some of the holes the educational system leaves.

The summer is a prime opportunity to go brain-dead. As I got older, I started realizing how much I forgot over the summer. In math classes for example, we generally spent the first two months strictly re-learning everything we'd flushed away via our summer lack of scholastic aptitude.