The Pissed Off Professor

I am not certain what valid purpose Spring Break serves:

• It comes at one of the most intense periods of a semester—a time that is make it or break it for a number of students.
• It is generally accompanied by the best weather of the year.
• It is difficult for everyone to return from.

Some instructors are loathe to collect work during the session before Spring Break as it implies to the students their work will be returned at the commencement of classes after the break. For a teacher, that means grading over the break, and many of us aren’t really up for that since we get no pay what-so-ever during that week.

Other instructors want to give their students the break to work on the assignments. Nice thought, but my experience has been Spring Break assignments are some of the worst, and they are almost always turned in late. (Can you say serious procrastination?)

A few of my colleagues think collecting work the session before the break ensures attendance, and while I used to walk that path, I found the number of deaths and similar excuses too hard to take on the eve of a short vacation, so in the interest of familial ties and overall public safety, I stopped collecting work on the day before break.

My pre- and post- break classes are basically participation-based: that way, I am more likely to have students attending; I don’t have to deal with lots of sudden deaths; and the first day back isn’t as painful as it could be.

No matter what I do, there are always casualties of the break: those who are holding on by sheer will and the remnants of gnawed-on fingernails who fall into the abyss during the recess.

This semester, my Spring Break body-count is three confirmed with a fourth unaccounted for. This is a much bigger number when put into perspective: before the break, I had a two-class total of twenty students, so I have lost 15% – 20% of my enrollment.

In terms of things schools could (and should) do to help students succeed, one of the no-brainers is to eliminate a week’s vacation in the middle of a school semester.

It would be easy to dial the break back to the Thanksgiving equivalent of time-off: instead of a full week, cancel classes the Thursday and Friday before Easter (because we’re kidding ourselves when we pretend the renamed break isn’t about a Christian holiday), and end the semester a bit earlier in the summer.

It’s a win-win situation, and it would keep a significant number of students from tumbling to their educational deaths.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 10:36 am and is filed under College, Education, Students, Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.