Charlie Melville
Charlie Melville
It’s spring break and you have your bags packed, ready to board a plane to visit family that lives in a different state, or maybe even a different country. After a very stressful beginning to the second semester of the year, you’re ready to kick back, relax and have a good time.
Then, you remember that you have a project due during break, and the panic begins.
The week before any break in college is generally the most stressful week. It’s the time for midterms, papers and last-minute grades. This means that when the break finally comes around, it is extremely well-deserved. But, some professors don’t realize the extent of students’ stress levels, and proceed to assign homework and projects over the break. When students have travel plans with family or friends, especially if the travel destination is another country, it’s not feasible to expect them to type the final draft of a paper or do a lab report during that time.
Assigning a project or homework over break isn’t particularly beneficial for a professor either. As a professor, if you just returned from a long relaxing break, it can be difficult enough trying to get back into the swing of things. Now imagine a hundred or so papers to grade on top of that stress. Sure, maybe you get grading out of the way sooner than you would if you assigned the paper after the break, but it’s not convenient timing by any means.
If I were a college professor, I would think the best option would be to assign a project or paper before the break, this way I could choose whether I wanted to use break time to grade them, or grade them when I got back from my vacation. Either way I would have extra time to work on grading, and therefore I would be less stressed, and so would my students.
The Student Stress Survey, published in College Student Journal, highlighted several common sources of stress for college students during the spring semester. One of the most prominent sources of stress was planning for vacation, which students end up having to do along with worrying about assignments and tests. After all the planning, students just want to be able to enjoy what they worked so hard to organize.
Lastly, for a lot of students, spring break is the only time they’ll get to see their families until summer. For first-year students in particular, being away from home can be difficult, especially if you’re close with your family. When that’s the case, it’s reasonable for students to want to spend as much time as possible with their family members. Having a project to do over break severely hinders a student’s ability to enjoy time with their family because, if the student is like me, before they turn in their project they’ll be stressed about it, even during the time they aren’t working on it. The assignment hangs over your head until you’ve finally pressed that submit button on Moodle.
The way I see it, assignments during spring break cause unnecessary stress that could easily be avoided, and therefore should not be given. Students deserve that week to wind down and relax just as much as professors do, so we can all work more diligently and effectively when we get back from spring break.