Ready for break

I look terrible. Not only has my stress-induced chest cold put a damper on my exercise schedule, but the last few almost-all-nighters have left puffy dark circles under my eyes. I say I've stopped showering because of the Durham water crisis, but, to be honest, I just haven't had time. When I looked in the mirror this morning, a chubby raccoon looked back. I wouldn't be surprised if I started rummaging through trash cans soon-either driven to madness by overworking or driven to hunger by lack of food points.

I feel like I should be doing better than this. I haven't been "out" in weeks, and I haven't been slacking on my readings this semester. If you're feeling like you're about to crumble under the weight of your workload, you're not alone. This is my fourth year here-I thought I'd be able to handle exam time by now. I was losing all faith in myself as a student when I realized that it wasn't even exam week yet. For some reason, all of my professors have forsaken the University-scheduled exam times and decided that they wanted final papers and projects due the last day of class.

Maybe they were trying to be nice. Maybe they wanted to let us leave early for break. Maybe they wanted to leave early for break themselves. Whatever the reason, every professor apparently thought that she was the only one with this creative idea. In each class, the lack of exam during exam week was announced like an early holiday present. Oh boy. Now I can write four 20-page papers and attend regularly scheduled class, too. Thanks.

I tried to pay attention to my final classes of the semester, but my mind always wandered and outlined a paper or fiddled with the graphics in a PowerPoint presentation. I'd look at my classmates' computers during lecture to see that they were furiously formatting essays: carefully adjusting margins to stretch or shrink their documents to the appropriate length. These assignments were clearly due soon.

Between classes, von der Heyden was abuzz with nail-biting, coffee guzzling and e-printing. The tables that are usually covered in pita and hummus were plastered with JSTOR articles and physics textbooks. Was there any learning happening there? Maybe a little. Was there any learning happening in that last week of class? Probably not. Not only are we not learning anything new, but we're probably not producing very good work on three hours of sleep and 17 Red Bulls. Perhaps exams are supposed to be during exam week for a reason. Maybe that last week of class is supposed to be for... class.

After all, exam week comes after a reading period, right? Absolutely not. "Monday" is not a reading period. It's a day. And don't try to tell me that Saturday and Sunday count as part of the reading period. We might be a little stressed out, Duke, but we're not stupid. We know that Saturday and Sunday are also known as "the weekend," and we never have class on the weekend. You aren't really fooling us. I don't understand why we don't have a real reading period. Heaven forbid we get three days to take a breath, take a nap or try to put real intellectual effort into our largest tests and papers of the semester.

Maybe I'm in the minority here. Other students could love the thrill of the sprint to complete a month's worth of schoolwork in seven days. After all, Duke students tend to thrive on stress. I'll admit that I enjoy the buzz I get when I complete a 10-page paper at 4 a.m. (such a sense of accomplishment, coupled with light-headedness), but that doesn't mean I wouldn't appreciate some more time.

If professors gave us the option of taking an exam or handing in a paper earlier, I might take some of them up on that offer. Students who wanted to get home for the holidays could buckle down for a few days, and students who wanted to spend a lot of time on their final assignments could do so. It would probably also help professors get a head start on the marathon grading they do to get our grades to us at warp speed. Having a choice could make everyone happy.