Just a weekend

Thanksgiving break—and the fall semester—just got a little bit longer. After multiple years of students skipping their Wednesday classes and ducking out of Durham on the Tuesday night before Thanksgiving, the University extended break for that extra day. Of course, Duke is not merely bestowing extra days off. In fact, it’s sneaking extra hours of class in. The Wednesday classes will be made up on the last day before finals. Instead of starting reading period Friday, undergraduates will trudge through a full day of classes, and the pre-finals study period will officially begin Saturday.

The tiny bit more class time created by the new schedule is designed to even out the number of minutes between classes that meet Monday-Wednesday-Friday and those on Tuesday-Thursday. Although that smidgen of time—the most a class could gain is 75 minutes—will not affect many classes, it could be key for courses like intro Italian or calculus that present the same material in multiple sections. Regardless of class time, all students take the same final, and an extra period could matter—especially because reading period, already truncated to begin with, has been condensed even further.

This fall, reading period will last from Saturday morning to Monday night. That’s not a reading period designed for intensive review; it’s a weekend.

At other schools that time before finals is called “reading week.” Although expanding the period to a full week is probably not necessary (and might significantly change the length of winter break), Duke needs to set aside unfragmented time for students to reflect on their semesters, review what they’ve learned and process how it all fits together. During the year, students rush to complete assignments piecemeal and reading period is one of the best times to let that knowledge distill and coalesce.

Reading period is also the last chance for stduents to catch up in classes and to seek help before taking tests that count for substantial portions of their grades. If that takes place over a weekend, professors and teaching assistants are less likely to be in their offices to offer help. That ultimate study period ought to be a time when the University’s resources are fully available, from the faculty to the facilities. Without those resources, reading period is just another break.