Column: Spring Break Day #STRESS
As everyone knows, we do not have a traditional Spring Break this semester and almost everyone is upset about it.
While I understand the initial thinking behind the “Spring Break Days” in order to protect us from causing a spike in COVID-19 cases, I don’t agree with them.
Other than the fact that we don’t have a week to relax this semester, I have other reasons for not agreeing with these random days off.
One reason I disagree with the Spring Break days is that the only people the school is preventing from potentially spreading the virus are students that have been following the rules in the first place. Namely, the students wearing their masks, social distancing, sanitizing and trying their best to take precautions to avoid transmitting the virus.
Many students have discussed just taking a week off of school and still having their own spring break. The school can’t really stop that, because it’s up to the students to show up to class or not. So while some students take a week off from school to relax and have fun, the rest of us are stuck at school and stressed.
In my case, I can’t go home to see my family until April. It’s too much of an expense to travel on a weekend where I leave Saturday morning, just to have barely 28 hours to see my family and drive back Sunday night.
Another reason I am against the non-traditional spring break is the fact that some staff is still assigning classwork, homework, quizzes and exams the day of or after the spring break day, which they aren’t supposed to do. How is that supposed to be relaxing?
Additionally, students who are taking the eight-week long courses, do not get the Spring Break days off. Say a student is taking two consecutive eight-week courses while taking other semester-long classes — that student won't have those days off because of those courses.
Students are allowed to leave and return to campus daily, so I don’t understand why a week would have been a big deal? Resident students could have submitted a negative COVID test in order to return to their dorms, similar to what we did when we came back from winter break.
Also, did you know that Martin Luther King Jr. Day counted as a spring break day although we already get that day off anyway? Technically, instead of having the five spring break days like they promised, they took one away and are only giving us four days off (if you can even consider it a day off).
While I understand that there is nothing that can be done at this point in the semester, I wish that the school would have taken a bit more time to consider different options for the spring semester. We could have come back to school a week later, or ended the spring semester a week earlier.
There were other possibilities available.
