We should get rid of fall break.
I know that sounds crazy. I, like most people, celebrated the arrival of break as a chance to recover from the flood of midterms and papers that assault the student body in early October. I spent most of the weeks leading up to break as a nervous, stressed-out wreck, and the chance to forget about that for a few days and go home was a relief.
But did it really help? By the time I’d driven four hours home and settled in, I had one full day to enjoy being home before I had to leave again. I didn’t get to relax — I got to adjust to being home, tell my parents what I’d been doing at school and do a load of laundry. Then I had to drive another four hours back and scramble to get some work done before classes and tests started again. Break was just a temporary reprieve, not the restful opportunity to catch up on work it should have been.
So how would removing break make life better? Without the disruption to class schedules and the work-week, professors might not have to cram quite so many major assignments into the time directly before and after break. Having these assignments just a little more spread out could make the stress a little less overwhelming for the whole semester. And several headaches that break brings — transportation home, or what to do in town if you stay, for example — would no longer be there to add to the pile.
Removing fall break would also leave two vacation days to be applied somewhere else, potentially Thanksgiving break. Making Thanksgiving a full week of vacation would effectively add four days to the recess when the weekend is taken into account. This would allow students who live farther from Charlottesville to have an easier time justifying a potentially expensive trip home. Even for students who only live a few hours away, the time spent traveling there and back would be less stressful when it was broken up by over a week at home rather than just five days. It would also allow students to potentially plan some getaways with friends that first weekend.
Thanksgiving is a much more recuperative break than fall reading days, and extending Thanksgiving would increase its beneficial effects. There are fewer major assignments directly before and after Thanksgiving because of its proximity to finals. Personally, I find I’m much more refreshed when I return in late November for this very reason. Extending this therapeutic time would set up students for a strong performance during finals, when it counts.
This obviously isn’t a perfect idea: I’m sure a lot of people would feel extremely burned out by the time Thanksgiving break rolled around. But I think removing fall break would allow the midterm assignments to spread out enough that this burnout would be minimized. And I would rather be stressed out during the semester so that when I did go home, I could actually relax rather than stress out even more about school and travel. This would be just like spring term, but with the break pushed back about three weeks.
As you settle back into the semester, ask yourself — did fall break really make your life easier? Would you have been better off just sticking to the routine and having a longer rest in November?
I think it’s worth considering.
Forrest Brown is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. His columns run Thursdays.
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