I’ve got it pretty easy when it comes to getting home for Thanksgiving. For me, returning to my Jewish mother’s nest entails is hopping on a train at 30th street station or a bus in Chinatown. I can leave Penn after my 5 o’clock class and still be home for dinner, so attending classes the day before Thanksgiving is not a big deal for me.

But for a pretty sizable chunk of Penn students, Wednesday classes are a much bigger nuisance. For example, 55 percent of this year’s freshman class lives beyond the catch-a-train-after-class Mid Atlantic bubble that stretches from New York to Virginia. They booked their plane tickets for late Wednesday night before their teachers canceled class on Wednesday. So, they are going to miss the beginning of the holiday festivities.

Then there are those pesky professors who, under the guise of giving students their money’s worth, hold classes on Wednesday. They pretend that it’s just a usual class day and ignore that there is just a sprinkling of a few brave, mainliners in an empty 200 seat lecture hall. The lecture is usually exceedingly boring because the professor can’t really teach anything new.

Why not get rid of this whole hoax? Why not standardize the whole ordeal and let students plan? If Penn wants to reach out to more students from more diverse geographic backgrounds, concessions need to made. Since there is really no value added by having class on Wednesday, Penn should just bite the bullet and cancel them.

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