Many may know me as the nerdy girl who wrote about loving class ranking and AP classes. So it should come as no surprise that I’m not opposed to teachers giving work over the summer.

Sure, it’s a pain. Reading and writing over the summer against your will is not fun, especially since summer is supposed to be our break from the oppressive authority of school.

Trust me, I’m as much of a procrastinator as the next guy. Back in my day, when AP World packets were half an inch thick, I left 19 pages of that summer work packet to do the day before school started. At that point, it took me half an hour per page, so I spent my last precious day of summer holed up in a dark room, pausing every few hours for a break from the monotonous world of hunter-gatherers.

From that horror story, one might be confused as to why I don’t hate summer work with a burning passion. Summer work can set the tone for the whole year. Last year turned out to be the worst year ever for my time management. Just looking at the packet, I knew that AP World meant business. And from my 10 hours of work that last day of summer, I knew that I would have to either say goodbye to eight hours of sleep most nights or learn to work faster.

Plus, most summer work is for upper-level classes. According to the KHS website, 13 of the 19 summer assignments listed are for honors or AP classes. If a student wants to tackle a harder class, some extra work should be expected. The extra work can prep students for the tougher classes, like the AP World work did for me.

Of course, summer work can be boring and seemingly pointless, and I love having completely empty days as much as anyone else. And sure, hardly anybody actually learns anything from the assignments. But that’s only because they don’t take it seriously. People spend time getting out of the work or pushing it off when they could be learning time management skills along with coursework.

If taken seriously, summer work can also prevent summer learning loss. According to the National Summer Learning Association, students typically score lower on standardized tests at the end of summer than they do at the beginning of the summer.

Yes, I’m a procrastinator and yes, I’m lazy, but I’m also a nerd who isn’t opposed to summer work. It’s like eating vegetables, it sucks and everybody hates it, but everybody has to do it because they will be better off in the long run.