Bank on It | A break from homework

Spring break has come to an end and, with it, a week absent of stress and work. Right?

Well, ideally that is what we would hope for. But unfortunately, many of us spent our time working — continuing our stressful studies in a new and perhaps warmer environment.

As a way to help students deal with stress and unwind, Penn should discourage the practice of giving homework over spring break.

Recently, attention has been directed toward how stress is affecting college students — specifically how levels of undergraduate stress have increased dramatically. A survey conducted by the University of California at Los Angeles found that the emotional health of freshmen nationwide has reached an all-time low.

There have also been reports of rising stress on Penn’s campus in the last couple months alone. An article published in The Daily Pennsylvanian last month reported that the number of students seeking counseling at Counseling and Psychological Services is currently the highest it has been in the last ten years.

Last year, The Daily Beast ranked Penn fourth in a list of the most stressful colleges in the nation — behind only Stanford and Columbia universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

So if our subtle requests for a stress-free spring break have fallen on deaf ears, allow me to ask more bluntly.

We need a real vacation. And it may sound crazy, but spring break would have been a fantastic opportunity to give us overworked students a much-needed rest.

Most people I talked to said that they had some sort of homework to do over break, and some had quizzes and tests the Monday and Tuesday that classes resumed. Even worse, many complained of having work assigned that was not posted until spring break had begun.

My break was spent studying for a midterm and a quiz, and one of my professors also highly encouraged research for a ten-page paper.

So what solutions are there for our stressed-out minds? There must be some way to solve our problems, aside from simply identifying them. What are other schools doing better than we are?

Many people might think that it is simply because Penn is an Ivy League university and, therefore, it is bound to be stressful.

This does not seem like a valid excuse. Cornell University — also an Ivy League institution that is academically rigorous — recently made a change to help its students.

“In an attempt to address mental health concerns on campus, the [Cornell] Faculty Senate voted [last] Wednesday to ‘strongly discourage’ faculty from assigning students homework over academic breaks,” according to The Cornell Daily Sun.

Although the proposal is not rock solid — because it only discourages homework and does not ban it — it is still a step in the right direction.

Spring break should be our vacation from school — a simple nine days of mental recuperation. Because, frankly, if that isn’t the purpose, why do we have spring break at all?

So, to our professors at Penn: no one appreciated that term paper due on Monday or the quiz on Tuesday. Our breaks were not as restful as they should have been and we are not ready to dive back in to the lectures we never got the chance to leave behind.

To the administration: consider taking a positive step toward relieving the enormous pressures you keep heaping upon us. Follow Cornell’s lead and be proactive. If it means that you discourage homework over breaks that would probably do more than you know.

Sarah Banks is a College sophomore from Okemos, Mich. Her e-mail address is banks@theDP.com. Bank on It appears every other Monday.

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