November casts a shadow over us all. The guilt of half-finished readings collapses into late-month deadlines highlighted on wall calendars. The time has passed when we might have caught up, and with the precious days left, we pump and thrum with dogged self-assurance. We sift through insurmountable debris like sewage-entangled catfish. Our lively mental faculties, at their peak in September and early October, have shriveled to paper-shuffling numbness. Our once Great Minds have gone dull.
Reading Week for the St. George Campus falls between February 14 and 18. At that time, students in full-year and spring term courses get a break. Students in first-term courses do not. Their break is Christmas holidays after sitting their final exams.
In Saskatchewan, university students get Remembrance Day as a holiday. Combined with Thanksgiving, this breaks up the semester somewhat. At U of T, Thanksgiving alone does not cut it. I ask the question here, “Should St. George Campus have a scholastic reprieve in the fall term?”
Vicki Liu, a student of International Relations and Economics is checking out twelve books downstairs in Robarts Library. She is frazzled and can only spare a moment. “Papers all come up at the end of the year,” she says, “plus you’ve got all the readings for those weeks. It’s impossible to do both. When I’m over-pressured, I can’t function at all. I’ve been so head-tight trying to cope.” Vicki has kept up with readings until now. Her grades have been exceptional. She maintains a full course load and keeps healthy by jogging and eating right. “Next week I have two essays due,” she says, “and I just know my routine will suffer.” Vicki fears burnout.
As we are every day being reminded by the medical community and life-management consultants, stress inhibits mental function. As Dr. Marla Shapiro said on a CTV television appearance in October, “in a stressful situation you narrow your thinking. You’re fearful. It’s difficult to encode the memory and then make it useful so you can spit out the facts.” While stress-induced adrenaline enhances factual regurgitation, Shapiro notes, it also narrows your ability to problem-solve. The latter is crucial to high grades, but the pileup of work during university crunch time turns our passionate pursuits of intellectual mastery into an arid scholastic drudgery by which we learn to turn against our alma mater.
Real efficiency only comes with a little rest. The human mind sorts itself out when it’s taking a siesta, and invention blooms in tranquility. Who would not agree that better ideas come out in conversation with professors and family than after hours at a computer?
The change in weather in October and November further justifies an opening set aside for slow(er) percolation of thought. At this time of year, sneezes varnish chair-arms inside Convocation Hall. Influenzal tissues cling to shoes on Philosopher’s Walk. Crust-nosed students mope from class to class, their brains salted not by the spice of scholastic enthusiasm, but by the desiccating brine of sickness. Figures for 2003-2004 printed in the Health Service Annual Report show clinic visits at the Koffler Student Services Centre peak at this time of year. Approximately 4,850 U of T affiliates visit the clinic in November; the number one cause, next to “family planning,” is “upper respiratory problems.” Crunch time provides an ideal window for tuberculosis to flourish.
Judith McLeod, a returning mature student of Chiropody at Michener Institute, has been sick five times in the past month. “Everyone in my classes is either suffering from some type of combination of flu or cold-like symptoms,” she says. “They’re stressed to the max. From this week right though to December 3, we either have two exams and two papers or two papers and an exam.” The Michener Institute follows the Arts & Science calendar which includes the February Reading Week, but Ms. McLeod’s classes are single term and the work in them is cumulative. “A week at the end of October,” she says, “would be a really great time for a break where you can accumulatively get caught up and also prepare yourself for the next crunch-month ahead, November.”
One post-secondary institution has realized this possibility. Trent University has two Residential Reading and Laboratory Weeks: one in February, the other the week of October 25. Though, like Markville Secondary School, which this year instituted a fall break, suicides have been a key factor in mobilizing administrations to address the issue. Once again, death cues us into reality. Where newspapers have covered the story, public opinion turns with newfound indignation.
Finding a student who does not support a fall Scholastic Reprieve is like finding a student who does not support free tuition-though not unheard of, it’s difficult. The question then is how to bring administrations from a lumber to a trot. But there are already indications this may prove impossible.
Christine Elias, associate director of communications for the Faculty of Arts and Science, said a subcommittee is currently working out a restructuring of St. George to be more in line with U of T at Scarborough. At the Scarborough Campus, students take 40 half-courses rather than 20 full-year courses.
“It’s a frigging nightmare,” says Dr. Andrew Patenall, professor of English at UTSC. “I mean just in terms of the wear and tear on students.” Dr. Patenall has taught at U of T for thirty-nine years. “At this time of year,” he says “staff and students, everybody is having a meltdown.” Scarborough follows a trimester system where all courses run for twelve weeks. “I’m not sure that it’s working,” says Dr. Patenall, “simply because of the exhaustion factor.” The only way to accommodate a mid-semester break, according to Dr. Patenall, is to move the start of classes to before Labour Day-“a move,” he says, “which this university has always resisted.”
While the fall semester needs a Reading Week, there’s more evidence that St. George students may lose the one they already have instead of gaining the extra one they need. This summer, the Faculty of Arts and Science published results of one year’s worth of discussion and debate as a response to the Office of the Provost’s Stepping UP initiative of last year. The 89-page report-plus-appendices, entitled Arts and Science Stepping UP, examines everything from budget, operating costs and enrolment to “high-priority initiatives” such as research and interdisciplinarity.
Section 3.2.5, “Making More Effective Use of Time and Space” states that “Shortening the winter semester by eliminating weekday mid-term tests or reading week would provide the opportunity for an intersession and the introduction of quarter courses.” The suggestion is a serious one. Departments have been asked to respond by March.
I decided to contact Paul Bretscher, President of Arts and Science Student Union, who worked on an Educational Advisory Committee related to Stepping UP. “We won’t know the final outcome,” he said, “until all the recommendations are implemented, but we don’t even know what the recommendations are right now.” The earliest possible date that reform would start, according to Mr. Bretscher, is the 2006-2007 school year. However, the size of undertaking that is Stepping UP would place implementation closer to its projected deadline of 2010. “In 2010,” the report concludes, “the Faculty of Arts and Science will be a vibrant intellectual community of students and scholars.” I would respond: “What about now?”
The fall term needs a scholastic reprieve. How do we know? Not from a turpentine-drenched sea-cucumber-committee’s parody of school life, but by chipped tooth-enamel and tartar bilges beneath the gums. We know by hard un-cancerous facial sores and reeking sweaty spore-grouted collars. We know through coffee breath and Listerine stains, through urine spills and trembling limbs. We know through influenza and the mocked and uncertain carriage of disadvantaged students walking the St. George pathways. We know by line-ups for hotdogs and sausages and noodles at cancerous stands. We know through late arrivals and unfocused eyes and the hung-neck solemnity of a tried student body. Students are burning out. Something must be done!
