Spring break should be an actual break

It seems like week after week, you’ve just been drowning in schoolwork, along with your club duties and regular work schedule—but, you look ahead and soon there will be a nice break from this. Your anticipation is building up, each day that goes by is one closer to spring break… but then you look at your assignment calendar and realize multiple things are due for the day you get back. Total bummer.

It seems without fail that for every school break some professors will make assignments due directly after break. This seems to defeat the point of a break, doesn’t it? A break should be a time to unwind and relax our minds, but this is hard to do when there’s a bunch of work due a day or so after break ends.

I know a lot of students who get burnout—a state defined by Psychology Today as one of emotional, mental and often physical exhaustion, brought on by prolonged or repeated stress—and break is the time to counter this exhaustion, to relax and build up stamina for the remainder of the semester. This is much more difficult to do when there are assignments you have to worry about over break, and for some the workload makes spring break not much of a break at all, just adding to the burnout.

It’s also worth mentioning that schoolwork during break is much harder to do for some than for others. Some students may have increased their work availability over break, some may go on vacation, some may be visiting with family members, some may not have access to the internet, and so on. This makes the break work quite unfair; student circumstances change drastically for break, and everyone will have different accessibility and time to finish the work. So, while the work defeats the point of break in the first place, it also allows unfair advantages to those with the resources available to do it.

Assigning things with the expectation that they will be worked on over break shouldn’t be allowed—spring break should be an actual break, which seems to be a no-brainer. But unfortunately, the break is treated by many as more time for students to get work done. There are so many students on this campus with tons of different personal lives, living situations and daily stresses, so a simple thing that can be done to make the school year easier is to leave breaks work-free. On top of this, I’m sure it will cause students coming back to be much more refreshed and ready to be engaged in schoolwork, and honestly make the students appreciate the professor just a little bit more (win-win situation here).  

So, if you’re a professor reading this and you realize you may have done this to your students, consider switching things up for the next break. So many students, including me, would greatly appreciate it.