Word: calendar
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...greatly enjoyed Eric Pulier's op-ed piece, "The Reading Period Blues". Certainly all undergraduates agree that the Harvard academic calendar, which Grinch-like steals the joy from our holidays then welcomes us back with two weeks in a pressure cooker as we try to do special Reading Period reading assignments, write term papers and prepare for exams all at once, seems to be the offspring of sadism and dementia, kept alive by tradition. I know I did, until I learned The One True Reason the academic calendar will never be changed to put finals before Christmas...
...year undergraduate plan, and last year I married one of the members of my original class, long since graduated. She is now on the Harvard Faculty. While Harvard's academic calendar makes life hellish for us undergraduates, it makes life heavenly for my wife and the rest of the faculty, to such an extent that I would not have believed it if I hadn't seen it in my own home...
...calendar were changed to push finals before Christmas break, those luscious weeks of September, when the crowds have left the Cape, the Vineyard, Nantucket and the Hamptons would be pushed out of the lives of the faculty. In addition many faculty members have vacation from mid-December till February under the current calendar. Putting finals before Christmas would erase this six-week, hiatus, and although certainly not all faculty members are of the "January-in-the-Caribbean" set, all of them are of the "Let's-dream-about-doing the Netherlands-Antilles-next-winter-maybe...
...change the schedule then? The main reason is that the Harvard calendar is created at least four years in advance. If anyone actually gets mad and decides to fight for a schedule change, at best it will only help students who are currently in high school--people probably well into their heavy acne stage...
...would think that somehow our academic calendar could be proven unconstitutional because of "cruel and unusual punishment." Unfortunately, the effort would never stand up in court. While the schedule is certainly cruel, at Harvard this kind of student neglect is far from unusual...