I planned my days off this coming week to include a trip to Montréal, several Halloween parties, and, to the service of my classes and teachers, some catch-up reading before my coming assignments and exams. The latter is, after all, why they call it “Reading Week,” isn’t it?
Except they don’t anymore. Reading Week has been stealthily shortened to “Co-Curricular Days” right under the public’s runny, flu-season nose. But if you didn’t notice the name change, you certainly noticed the exclusion of Monday and Tuesday from our would-be vacation.
Call it a first-world problem, but I’m calling it out.
Reading Week was a form of salvation when the going got tough. This is the second year it’s been a three-day affair (five days including the weekend), and the adjustment has been felt all around campus, in the form of sighs, groans, and a few tears. Two days might seem trivial, but my Introduction to Psychology class explicitly suggested that a substantial autumn break is vital to mental health.
For the exact reason this complaint seems so slight, it is also so worthwhile. How important was it, really, to exclude Monday and Tuesday from our time off? Even if the York Senate quote students and faculty who didn’t like the way Reading Week was pre-2012, they fixed something that was totally functional.
Yes, it grinds my gears that they also selected three days that every student targets at enrolment time. That is, 75 per cent of students probably already have Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday off, so really we have two class days omitted. But we innocuously did that to ourselves, so Iwill pick my battles.
The real problem with the abbreviated Reading Week is that five weekdays, sandwiched by two weekends, allowed people to travel. It was a nine-day vacation.
But three weekdays and a weekend means most of us are stuck here. Any student from outside Toronto, and especially from outside Ontario, may have once been able to fit a trip to see their family in Reading Week, but Co-Curricular Days don’t really give us the room.
This is particularly unfair to first-year students, who are just getting accustomed to university and life away from home. It’s not that five days isn’t long enough to pop in to your home; it’s which five days, and how much you can really relax when you get there.
Maybe Wednesday to Sunday isn’t the best time slot for many. Hundreds of students would prefer Monday to Wednesday for their visit home.
Personally, things are looking grim for my Montréal trip, and if Ido end up going, I’ll be spending the same $120-plus that Iwould have in 2011 on bus tickets, except the trip will be one day long instead of five.
While we went without a Reading Weeks for the first 14 years of our academic lives, we didn’t need a fall reading week back in high school because our only stresses were easy homework and maybe late puberty. Most high school students lived at home.
University is a whole new ball game. It’s a nether of stress and homesickness (whether or not students will outwardly admit so), and we need something to look forward to when the term begins.
Personally, Ionly plan visits home for Christmas and the summer now, but in first year, I was motivated through my first weeks by the knowledge that a little over a month after starting school, I would be able to get away from York and from Toronto.
Perhaps kvetching about the loss of Reading Week is maddeningly inconsequential when compared to some enormous student problems like security concerns and tuition hikes. But Reading Week, if nothing else, was supposed to be our break from all of that.
Dustin Dyer
Features Editor
