Picture it: You’ve just written three essays in the span of a week, you finally turned in all of your assignments, your room is a mess and you can’t wait to just go home and lounge in your pajamas on the couch. It’s the last day before break and you’re chatting with your friends when your professor walks in to inform you of a ten page paper in APA format due the Tuesday after break. Your dreams of having a restful time off are shattered.
As much as I look forward to going home and spending time with my family, there’s that nagging thought in the front of my mind: how much will I actually get to rest? When we hear that there is a break coming up, we want to actually be able to enjoy it. Instead, we have to focus on the stress of making sure we didn’t forget to bring something home from campus that we’ll need to submit an assignment. Not only that, but a lot of students have jobs back at home that expect them to come in on school breaks, and some of us need this money just to be able to continue paying tuition. I know personally, my job asked me to send them my break schedule as soon as I got it.
I’m not saying that individual professors assign an unholy amount of work for their classes over breaks. What I’m saying is that when we have multiple professors assigning us one or two assignments each, it quickly builds to an overwhelming workload. Most of us are taking fifteen to eighteen or possibly more credits every semester. That is a lot of classes, which means a lot of professors assigning work. It begins to feel exhausting because instead of sitting in the living room and catching up with my mom and my brother, I’m stuck in our home office working on assignments so I don’t get distracted by “outside factors”. By the time I get back to school it feels as though I didn’t get to spend time with my family at all.
We as students want and deserve for our breaks to give us the rest and recovery we need from the stress of the semester. We want to be able to go home and spend time with our families, but half of our time is consumed with working to keep our heads above water with finances, and another quarter of that time is spent doing homework for our classes. It feels like any other weekend on campus and it’s frustrating. We come back to campus feeling just as tired and burnt out as we did when we left because we didn’t truly get a break.
I don’t just mean students – professors want to go home and spend time with their families too. They don’t want to have to focus on making sure students are turning in assignments, and they really don’t want to focus on grading. So they shouldn’t have to. All we are asking for as students is a few days where we don’t have to think about school at all. We all want to be able to go home and enjoy our time.
Now, this is not me accusing our professors of being harsh or cruel. I can’t picture any of them going home and thinking, “I want to see my students suffer. Let’s assign a ten page paper, a reading report, and three worksheets due as soon as we get back.” I think that sometimes we fail to remember that they were all students once too. They have been in our shoes and they get it. They understand the desire to go home and kick our feet up. But even so, breaks can sometimes feel more overwhelming than the semester.
With October break coming up, I think it’s time for both students and professors to be thinking about this. We’ve been at school for over a month, some of us not having had a chance to go home and see our families, some of us feeling extremely homesick. We want to be able to go home and spend time with the people we haven’t seen. School breaks don’t actually feel like breaks, but maybe with the help of professors we can change this. Maybe it’s time to actually take a break. ★
Grace is a communications major in her junior year with minors in business administration and political science. She loves being a part of all of the exciting events on campus and getting to meet new people through them.
