Reading week is great in theory — a week away from your normal overloaded university schedule — but in reality, it is never actually a week away.
A normal week in the life of a university student is packed full of seminars, lectures and those weekly discussion posts, which seem easy, but actually take an unbelievable amount of time. By the time Friday rolls around, the idea of having an entire week to relax sounds like a dream. Unfortunately, that dream tends to be just that, a dream of a severely overworked and slightly delusional student.
My first issue with this idea of a week-long break is that it is never really seen as one. Professors seem to think that this week is the perfect time for catching up on course content that is easily forgotten in the chaos of deadlines and assignments.
Let’s be real: expecting students to use this time to catch up is not entirely unreasonable. I actually wouldn’t mind a full week of catch-up time; however, this attitude usually tends to give professors a push to pack as much content in as possible before the break because, hey, students will have a whole week to figure it out.
The real issues come in when reading week begins and inevitably you realize missing a week of classes does not mean missing a week of academic responsibilities. There’s this lovely loophole professors love to take: they won’t assign a huge midterm assignment during the break because that would be cruel, but the Monday schools are back in term, that’s a different story.
Midterms are often held at the return of the session as well, meaning students are expected to spend their supposed break preparing for exams rather than actually taking a break. Instead of having the opportunity to recharge after weeks of academic exhaustion, students are left trying to balance studying, unfinished assignments and whatever personal responsibilities they have been putting off.
Students are not just facing midterm exams or assignments; they often have to prepare for both. If you are anything like me, you have multiple midterm assignments — which are always worth a vast portion of your grade — and midterms coming in on the same week.
For a period that can feel remarkably similar to exam season in terms of workload, students should be given a full week without the expectation of catching up on course content or juggling additional holiday commitments. And speaking of holidays, that brings me to my biggest issue with the overhyped reading week.
As I’m sure all of us Brock students know, the university loves to stack a holiday break.
With Thanksgiving starting the break, the whole weekend becomes a write-off for a lot of students. Between traveling home, family dinners and other holiday commitments, the first few days of the break can disappear before students even have a chance to open their laptops.
Thanksgiving is supposed to be a time to spend with family and friends, but for students already overwhelmed by their academic workload, it usually becomes another thing to squeeze into an already packed schedule.
This is one of the only times students can recharge with their loved ones during a stressful semester, and it is seldom realized in this way.
Ultimately, the way reading week is set up by academic institutions asks the question: how much can the average student actually study, read, work and most importantly, rest?
Reading week should be more than a convenient gap in the academic calendar. Students need time to recover from the demands of university, not just enough time to prepare themselves for the next wave of deadlines. A break should not require a carefully negotiated balance between academic survival and basic personal time.
Maybe reading week would live up to the hype if it actually gave students the one thing it promises: a chance to take a break.