Having a fall reading week/mid-term break is by no means a novel idea. I say reading week/mid-term break because the upcoming referendum here at the University would involve giving students two extra days off in the fall rather than a full reading week, but I will use the terms interchangeably. In fact, around a dozen of the 20 universities in Ontario already have a fall reading week. It has been implemented mostly as a means to deal with mental health issues inherent in the post-secondary school system by providing students with some time to relieve stress and relax. So why shouldn’t the University of Waterloo do the same thing? While I applaud the intention of fall reading week, there are, in fact, a couple reasons that maybe we should hold out on this one.
The first and main reason fall reading week or break may be a bad idea is the scheduling aspect. In order to create a week off, we are going to have to make up the time elsewhere. The main consensus is that either we take time from Orientation Week and start school early, or take time from Christmas break and end finals later. Neither of these seem like great options. For example, finals end this year on Friday, December 19. So if we were to have a fall reading week, we could potentially add the 20th, 22nd and 23rd to the final exam period. Would you really want to be writing a final exam from 7:30pm to 10:00pm on December 23? And what would happen if we had one of those ever elusive snow days? Would we have to go to school on Christmas Eve? I would say arguably that would be a pretty stressful situation, especially for people who have to move out of Waterloo to a place further away than, say, Southern Ontario.
And what about the second scenario of reducing Orientation Week? Orientation week is meant to give the first years some time to acclimate themselves to their surroundings and to make the transition to university easier. This is likely the first time they are living on their own, and reducing the amount of time they have to get used to this also contributes to increasing stress.
Additionally, reducing Orientation Week has impacts not only on first year students, but also students on co-op. Now there is less time between co-op and school for us to move out of our co-op places and move back to Waterloo. This is especially true for those who have co-ops abroad. That’s very little time to be back with your family and friends (who you may not have seen for four months) before starting school. Getting rid of the break in between co-op and school also gets rid of a time for relaxation and de-stressing.
This also impacts employers who wish to take advantage of the Orientation Week to have some overlap of co-ops to allow the transition to be smoother.
There are other ways to make up the time: make-up lectures, reducing break time between lectures and weekend lectures being some examples but these all arguably create more stress throughout the term by making it even more packed, than the amount of stress that a Fall Reading week might relieve.
Another thing to think about is how it would align with Hell Week. Most Fall reading weeks lie in October which is coincidentally when hell week lies. So would our fall reading week be right before, or immediately after midterm week? If it was right before, students would be spending most of their time studying instead of de-stressing. While if reading week was after midterms, we would likely spend it doing assignments and projects that we would inevitably be assigned due to missing 2 weeks of lectures in a row. And if students spend their reading week relaxing and de-stressing as intended instead of doing assigned work they could end up returning to school and be far behind in coursework creating a stressful situation. There is also the fact that different years and departments have hell weeks at different times which can add complications to the timing of a Fall Reading week.
If extra days were added during Orientation Week they would likely end up being de facto days off anyways. Talking to people who have had fall breaks this year, almost all of them just didn’t go to their first two days of class which occurred during our Orientation Week. If this becomes the case then students end up starting school already two days behind which would cause additional stress while they are trying to catch up.
The entire idea of fall reading week is to help with mental health by reducing stress. Fall reading week might not actually accomplish this objective though. Arguably it can be seen that in the big picture that if stress were quantifiable, more stress may end up being created than removed if a fall reading week were to be implemented.
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