In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving break last year, my undergraduate students sent me a barrage of emails wondering if they might be excused from attending sections on Wednesday of Thanksgiving week.

They would have already decamped for home, in many cases. In others, they would be en route.

This was understandable: Of course students wanted to spend the holiday with their families.

I moved my courses onto Zoom. Even so, many of my students were in transit during their sections. Attendance was lower than any other week of the quarter. Should I penalize those students for needing to travel to spend a family holiday with family?

That seems, to me, against the spirit of the season and certainly not something to be thankful for.

My students’ absences comes as no shock. Rather, by holding a normal day of classes on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, we are ensuring a poor day of education at UCLA.

It’s past time to add one more day at the beginning of Thanksgiving break to accommodate those students who need to travel to be with family.

There are surely logistical hurdles involved with such a change, not least a lost day of instruction. But that problem dissolves upon a moment’s reflection: As fall course instruction typically starts on a Thursday, the lost Wednesday can easily be tacked onto the front end of the quarter.

The value of a free Wednesday before Thanksgiving is immensely greater than that of an ordinary Wednesday in late September. Just start the quarter one day earlier.

I am from back east and don’t get to see my family so much. I spent two Thanksgivings during graduate school visiting my brother’s family in Michigan to do just that.

Because of Wednesday coursework, I twice had to take short, four-hour red-eyes and arrive a shell of myself on the holiday morning. Not pleasant! I hardly had time to make my famous pumpkin pie.

I suppose I could have skipped my courses those days – or cancelled the sections I’m teaching – but to force such choices by keeping Wednesday as an official day of instruction is then encouraging instructors to freelance cancellations, hardly an enlightened policy.

Why would we continue to make such a choice as a school? Only from inertia and stubbornness, I fear. Many pedagogical problems are hard – the right balance of speech protections in the classroom, say, or the implications of ChatGPT for writing instruction generally.

This is not such a problem – we ensure both a bad day of teaching and a headache on the holiday by holding classes the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

We need to do the right thing for education at UCLA: cancel them.

Sammy Feldblum is a doctoral student studying geography at UCLA.