20131011.0919

Today is Fall Break at Oklahoma State University.  I am given to understand that the school's offices are open, but classes are not in session, so I was able to sleep in and am now putting this piece together instead of wrapping up one class and making ready for another.  While I certainly do not mind having gotten an extra hour or three of sleep, and I appreciate the chance to do things about the house (including more writing, I hope), I admit to being somewhat confused by the fall break...thing.  I am not certain I understand the need--or the timing.

The need--honestly, I do not see it.  The semester began in the middle of August, so that it has been just under two months in progress.  It seems a short time to need a break from studies entered into voluntarily, studies which are supposed to be themselves fulfilling and therefore invigorating.  Too, the students are overwhelmingly young; should they not be able to press on, using the energy and verve that are supposed to accompany youth?  And, honestly, do they not have projects--even from other classes than mine--to which they ought to be paying attention during the break?  Certainly the faculty do; I know that I am not the only one who will be using the day to try to get ahead on projects, for the classroom and otherwise.  So it is not a great, grand break, and I think it would scarcely be missed were it not had; my teaching in The City did not offer me any such breaks, after all, and the students and faculty who actually cared about the work did not suffer therefrom.  (Those who did not were already suffering; a break would not have helped them.)

The timing is also a source of confusion.  Yes, the schools I attended--primary, secondary, and undergraduate--took Columbus Day off, which I suppose is something like a fall break.  (I will not be getting Columbus Day off--or an observance for the more appropriate Leifr Eirikssons Dagr.  Or the yet more appropriate First Nations Peoples' Day.)  But it is also a federal holiday, and I see the sense in other offices, essentially outgrowths of government (since I went to public school and a state college), closing alongside the federal government--the more since so much private enterprise shuts down, as well.  It offers families a chance at togetherness (and, more frequently, a chance at "great sales", as I have railed against before), and I support such a thing.  Fall break, coming at the end of a week and not overlapping into holiday observance, does not, and so it confuses me.  And, in honesty, it confused me when I was in graduate school and my institution observed a fall break (two days, as I recall, and full of grading and paper-writing, so hardly the breakiest of breaks).

Perhaps it is the case that I am simply a curmudgeon, dedicated to the unenjoyment of things and the killing analysis of ideas that ought to pass unremarked, that I do not see the point in taking time off for...nothing.  But I see it as a particular peril when I and those like me are derided for "only" working so many days a year, for "getting all those days off."  Our position is hardly strengthened by such things as fall break; those who would criticize our schedules do not see the work that we do at home, the writing that is going on even now as we struggle to add to human knowledge and to refine the knowledge that already exists.  They see the empty classrooms and the students cavorting freely, and I do not know that I can blame them for wondering what it is that our schools are actually doing when that is what they see.