Each semester, there is one time in particular when professors should avoid making assignments due. During the spring semester, it's the first few days after Spring Weekend. As we wrote last April, professors who assign work due the following Monday or Tuesday aren't just being unkind to their students — they're disrespecting a school-wide tradition that's been around for 50 years.
But professors who assign work due immediately after Thanksgiving take things even further. For starters, Thanksgiving has been a national tradition for nearly 400 years. And unlike students who find themselves having to work on Spring Weekend, students swamped with work over the Thanksgiving break don't simply miss something as seemingly trivial as a weekend of partying. Rather, they lose out on their last chance to rest and recharge before final exams. Because Brown only gives students one other day off during the fall semester, the Thanksgiving break is much needed by the time it finally arrives. And because it precedes the most stressful part of the semester, Thanksgiving is crucial to students' academic success every fall.
Sadly, based on our personal experiences and anecdotes we've heard, many professors don't see things the same way, and are more concerned with cramming in as much material as possible in the last two weeks of classes.
Some professors give out assignments early so that students have an opportunity to complete work before the break begins. But many other professors sensibly structure their courses so that a large project is due just before Thanksgiving, and students have no work over the break. This means that students are inevitably swamped the week before the holiday, and they simply can't take advantage of the opportunity to complete another assignment early.
So we merely ask that professors refrain from making work due during the first few days after Thanksgiving break. We see no reason that a paper or problem set due Monday couldn't be postponed for just a few days. It would give us just one more thing to be thankful for.
Editorials are written by The Herald's editorial page board. Send comments to editorials (at) browndailyherald.com.
