<p>FiddlinEcon - I see your point. In fact, I think your point is much better shown in musical instruments. You can skip FL practice for a week and still be able to pick up where you left off very quickly, but not so in violin or piano, especially if you are still in “learning” stage. However, I still think that by attending classes AND doing homeworks, the students are engaged with other subjects on a daily basis. Sure they don’t do much math in the summer, but this is why teachers spent a week or two at the start of fall to review prior year material. If they miss their classes even occasionally, or skip their homeworks, they will suffer. Pardon me for using my story to illustrate this. I went through Calc BC without doing any of my homeworks because I can still get a good grade with good test scores alone. I got a 5 on the AP, BUT those missing homeworks caught up with me. I was not able to do problems as fast as I’d like. Formulas and proofs faded out at an alarming rate. A year later (I did not take math for a year), I retained very little of what I had learned. But again, it is a whole level of hurting with missing violin or piano practices.</p>