Stop Blaming the Trustees: The Paradox of Midsession

I woke up this morning and realized that it was already Saturday, October 16. Midsession is coming to a close, and I moan out loud to the thought of starting classes again on Monday. Yet I am grateful for the nice little break I enjoyed this week. For me, Midsession workload included watching movies, going to a lecture, and a couple of short papers here and there: significantly less than the workload of my usual week. Add to that sleeping in late and going to the mall, and I was doing pretty good.

Yet for a lot of students at Trinity College Midsession was all about work and no play. "I have immense amounts of work," Claire Bullock told me. One of the many unlucky students with actual work to do over the Midsession, she can't even think about studying for the upcoming midterms because of all the work she was assigned for this week. I think Dave Rothman, a sophomore, was true in stating: "Reading Week was there to catch up on our reading- but Midsession only adds more work to catch up on."

Ah, everyone remembers Reading Week. It seems like years ago when our school gave us this wonderful week where we had ample time to catch up on our work and relax. But instead we now have Midsession, a week of unfair workloads and just a whole lot of confusion.

To quote a freshmen: "I don't know what it used to be like, but what is the point of Midsession?" Well, I don't know the answer to that either. It is apparent that student opinions are torn over the issue concerning Midsession. And I feel that our opinion is especially crucial now, with rumors saying that the college is getting rid of Reading Week/Midsession all together next year.

On one hand we have students bogged down with way too much work. If they had to pick between Midsession or no Midsession, they would rather do away with the whole Midsession, and I don't blame them. If going to classes one extra week meant less work, I would also do away with Midsession and all it's "Midsession work".

Yet there are people like me, lucky enough to have sympathetic professors- hence moderate amounts of work. Having to go watch a movie three nights in a row for one of my classes was the definitive reason I stayed on campus. Yes, I could have gone home after those three nights but by half way through the week, I had no motivation to drive home. So I ended up staying on campus the whole of Midsession.

Other students like me with moderate amounts of work and activities are a rare kind: we were able to accomplish the goal of Midsession. We remained on campus, yet without any ridiculous amounts of work. The school is happy because we stayed, and we're happy because we watched movies and relaxed. Therefore, my vote goes to keeping Midsession alive.

And then there are those students who took off at the first sight of not having any classes. Forget about having overwhelming amounts of work! Without any significant amount of work, nor movies and lectures to bind them to the campus, these students were out of Trinity faster than if I had yelled "FIRE"!

It seems to me that it is exactly these students who are at the heart of the problem. They are the reason reading week was replaced by bombardment of innocent students with tremendous amounts of work. They are the reasons why we now have a paradoxical Midsession where students are prevented by their own school to catch up on their work and study for exams. Yet there are still students who get off scot-free and take off.

So now there are rumors that Midsession will be gone next year. This punishes the rule abiding students with moderate amounts of work, who stayed on campus. Is this fair? No. It is not fair to those students with work to keep giving them work, nor is it fair to take Midsession away from students who can sincerely benefit from them. I would have liked to get the opinions of students who left for Midsession, but I couldn't catch them before they took off.

I can't help but think that there must be a medium between the two radical choices of having a paradoxical Midsession and no Midsession at all. And maybe there is even a way to let students leave without screwing over those students who are made to stay, or chooses to stay. I would like to end this article with a quote from John Morley: "Reading Week is not a sham that other schools think it is". To make this statement true, whether we call it reading week or Midsession, we all need to come up with a better system.