Art by Samantha Miller
Hey Pepperdine, your students are tired. We’ve been through midterm after midterm — why can’t we just have a break? A real one.
It’s not fair that most universities have a full week for fall break, and more three-day weekends. Pepperdine students have to struggle without either of those.
Pepperdine’s Thanksgiving break needs expansion or alteration with more flexible travel opportunities for students to allow for a truly restful experience.
This past year, we learned how beneficial it is to conduct asynchronous learning to accommodate our international students and those who live in different time zones.
For those of us living on the West Coast, it is convenient to leave school, come back and leave again. However, for those who live farther, or internationally, this dependent travel is not feasible.
Additionally, traveling during Thanksgiving is more expensive compared to other holiday travel. For these students, traveling during Thanksgiving break might not even be worth it.
When you account for travel time and expenses, the three school days used for Thanksgiving break become impractical.
After Thanksgiving “break” is over, we come back to school for two weeks of instruction. This is actually only one week of learning because the other is dedicated to cramming knowledge for finals.
Whatever happened to taking baby steps? Have we forgotten about having a whole year online and dealing with the stresses of the pandemic?
We went from complete isolation to immediately rushing into campus life. Don’t get us wrong — we love being on campus and returning to whatever sense of normalcy we can recapture, but a longer break would help us to recuperate from all that we have been through.
Imagine this: A student leaves school on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving Day. That student will then travel a certain amount of hours to their location while fighting through traffic or holiday bustle of LAX. So, if Wednesday and Sunday are dedicated to travel, a student really only has three days to spend with family and loved ones. And not to mention the amount of homework the student takes with them.
This just isn’t enough. Why do we have spring break — but not a fall break — when some of us are still adjusting to the fast-paced nature of college?
So, we would like to propose a few alternatives.
Monday and Tuesday of Thanksgiving break could take place asynchronously in order to give students more time to travel. Alternatively, we could also start the fall semester earlier so we can either have a longer fall break or a full week for Thanksgiving break.
These solutions provide students with the ample amount of time they need to travel and spend some quality time with their loved ones.
Any one of these suggestions are plausible. After all, we adapted our academic calendar last year.
Let’s do it again — but stick to it this time.
_________________
Follow the Graphic on Twitter: @PeppGraphic
Email Pepperdine Graphic Media: peppgraphicmedia@gmail.com
