This year’s Spring Break is over, and it was a mess, as usual. The students got a full week of vacation, while I got nothing, other than a pile of grading and the need to do their lab work for them (admittedly, a small trivial bit of their work, because flies keep breeding no matter what the calendar says). Then we had a blizzard, which has disrupted everyone’s travel schedules — I have students who will miss class for the entire first half of this week, because airlines have been cancelling all kinds of flights into the upper midwest.
My modest suggestion is that in future years we abolish the tradition of Spring Break. Everyone just stays at the university working, and then we finish up the term a week early. Less chaos! More order! No more resetting unrealistic expectations by allowing them to escape to a warm sunny beach somewhere. No more youthful debauchery. Reality is cold, icy, white landscapes scoured by bitter winds, overseen by dour gray-bearded taskmasters. The sooner they get used to it, the better.
There may be some initial resistance, but everyone will eventually adapt, and I won’t have to go through this yearly ritual of having to modify course- and lab-work to accommodate these unserious childish hijinks.
No one is learning biology here.
So pessimistic Professor. Surety they are learning 2 legs good, 8 iegs better.
X-D
The real problem isn’t Spring Break.
It is the weather in the upper Midwest in general and Minnesota in particular.
I always think of it as an icy subartic landscape.
Some of my relatives used to live in the upper Midwest. Almost all of them have moved. A lot of them ended up in California.
It’s called Spring Break because it gives the dour, grey-bearded taskmasters an opportunity to break another body part. Knees? Back? Hip? Shoulder?
Oh, they’re learning biology. They’re learning about the “intelligent design” of knees, ankles, backs, neck, etc. And, of course, they’re learning about the mechanism of reproduction.