Thursday, March 31, 2005
The Discontinuation of Spring Break
Although breaks are normally welcomed to those of us who are day after day forced to pay attention to countless professors lecture on topics that are perhaps mildly interesting at best, returning from a break proves more difficult than simply pushing through without a break.
Coming back from Spring break, students require a certain time period of “recovery.” Those who flew back mere hours before their first class on Monday morning could have used another week to recover from their trip, talk with their friends, and perhaps catch up on the homework that stayed strategically on their desk while they basked in the afternoon Florida sun. Students like me who, instead of taking an exotic sun-filled vacation, remained in the cold grasps of Michigan ended up struggling through needless assignments, bulk reading, and papers that were all assigned because professors assumed that we would have the time to do just about anything on our one break during the Spring semester. I definitely could have used this new week as an actual break.
Getting back “into the swing of things” – the most popular phrase used by my professors in the last two days – proves to be much more difficult than perhaps originally intended. Professors assume that, since students – at least most of them – went on vacation or spent the week relaxing, it is perfectly acceptable to bombard them with new material, countless assignments, and paper requirements a day or two after the break. Professors make it completely impossible to slowly slide back into the endless tedium of the college workload; they pile on assignments that currently seem too difficult to accomplish.
The result? We students shut down. Instead of trying to live up to the incredibly high expectations presented by professors during this time, we put off work, do half-hearted jobs, and curl up into little balls in the darkest corner of our rooms, put on the angriest music we can find, and silently weep and mutter under our breath at the overload of stress that came as a result from the ever-anticipated Spring break.
If all professors constantly take the liberty of creating overwhelmingly stressful situations for students during the week after Spring break (and let me tell you, once the stress begins it is practically impossible to get rid of it because somehow the work just continues to pile up) I would rather just continue classes straight through the time allotted for the break and just get out a week or two early at the end of the semester. This way instead of bitter professors – perhaps because they did not acquire the same tan that so many students brought back from sunnier places than dreary Michigan – assigning unreasonable amounts of work in the week or two after Spring break, they can continue with the normal workload, silently snickering to themselves because for once it isn’t noticeable that they themselves did not get the chance to get the pre-summer tan that is affiliated with Spring break.
Maybe this is not the best answer to the incredible amount of work given after Spring break, but at least it would prevent professors from having an excuse to say, “Well, since you all had a week to relax (oh really?), we’ll just get you right back into the swing of things by assigning everything that we could think of plus other suggestions from other professors in our field!” What made us students so susceptible to extreme torture such as this?