For students in college, it should have been the best time of year. Yes, we are talking about the glorious holidays known as Spring Break and Easter Break. The breaks notoriously known to people as a time to let loose, travel to other places and somehow stagger back to campus slightly hungover and most definitely sunburnt.

Alas, this time of leisure and relaxation has been shattered by some professors. Instead of students taking an actual break from school, hence the word break, they are being loaded down with homework that is supposed to completed over the break, and having to study for tests that fall on the first day back from break.

If we look at the average life of a student, most of them have jam-packed days and weeks that don’t let up. Speaking from personal experience, I know that most students go to work for 20 hours a week, while also taking five classes. On top of the work that is expected from these classes, most people also add on the meetings and responsibilities for the extracurriculars they are in. Please don’t take this as me complaining about actually having to do work; this is college and it can get stressful, but it’s all perfectly normal. The thing that keeps me going through all of this, is looking forward to breaks where I know that I will have to do none of these things for at least a few days.

Unfortunately, I had to give myself a reality check about what was going to happen over Spring Break. I had been assigned a test that was going to happen the Monday after Spring Break. Of course, this put a damper on my plans. The overhanging cloud of dread about having to study for this test and knowing that I probably wouldn’t get a chance to, had set in. Now, I had anxiety over the likelihood of failing this test, all because it was over a break.

What also doesn’t make sense is the fact that professors are giving themselves more work to do. With all the papers and tests being assigned, they now have to take time to grade them when they could’ve just not assigned anything in the first place until Spring Break was over. Since most students are probably not going to do well on these assignments, they will now have to grade half-done work that was probably done last minute. This goes to show that some professors have a mentality of not respecting students time and the fact that they have other classes to work on.

The thing is, if there were a valid reason to give work over the break, most people would not be complaining about it. The truth is, I can’t seem to find even one miniscule idea about why professors would assign this kind of work. Most curriculum is not on that big of a time crunch that they cannot allow one week off of work. At this point, is there even a break? It really just becomes a week where the professor cancels class but still has the work in place.

It’s a simple call to action: just stop assigning so much work over the break. I’m sure most students would thank you profusely and there would be less failing grades. There might even be an increase in productivity once the students return from their week of leisure.