Spring Break Reflecion

 It's equinox season which also means it's spring break season. Students and faculty switch from thinking about beginning to ending. For students, endings range from the simple "end of the semester but still have lots of courses before graduating", to the more panicky "OMG I have so much to do so that I can graduate this semester."  For students with many course still be be taken, the spring break functions more like a brief breather, a tiny landmark that denotes progress. For students in the OMG category, spring break provides time to get caught up on assignments, begin planning for the family attendance at the commencement ceremony, finish job applications, or just sleep and do house work.  Admittedly, I've never heard a student complain about having a week of reprieve.

Faculty too have patterned responses to the spring break. Those with school age children often take the time for a brief family vacation. (Hence the sharp increase in the % of children on airplanes.) Other faculty, like so many of their students, take the time to get caught up on the variety of tasks that plague faculty, like accreditation reports, meeting agendas and minutes, low priority but necessary emails, grading papers and exams, polishing the manuscript that is almost ready to send, or search once again for a grant funding source for that kool idea that won't go away. Naturally, there are a few faculty who look like the slacker category, who, like some students, don't do work, but in doing nothing regain composure and energy for the remainder of the semester.

There are no strict rules, but academic norms about how to spend spring break. Sure, Human Resources has a policy, but academic freedom seems extended to flexibility in time management. In today's environment of productivity focused performance measures, how to recharge the intellect becomes an interesting question. Research on creativity and even more classical productivity converges on the need to have time to "do something different" as a stimulus for the next push. Spring break, no matter how it is taken, provides just that, a break, from the routine and a time in which the little grey cells can rejuvenate.