University of Virginia Library

An Awkward Time

That odd interval between Christmas and
the end of the first semester has always
annoyed students forced to live through it.
The Christmas holidays are the natural end of
scholarly pursuits for the first semester. But
doing things naturally has never been a forte
with the men who make calendars for the
University. So we are subjected to a week of
classes during which there are frantic attempts
to add on bits and chunks of material which
were left out of the main body of work; then
there are the reading days, during which we
struggle to remember the things that the
holidays helped us to forget. Then there are
exams, of which the less said the better. Then,
barely three weeks after returning to
Charlottesville, we're off on another vacation.

There are reasons for this, chief among
them being that Christmas refuses to fall
obligingly in the middle of January. But they
are not insurmountable if a sincere attempt is
made to rearrange the curricular calendar.
Other institutions comparable to this one have
quarter systems, or 4-1-4 programs which
either get the studying done earlier and
combine the Christmas and semester breaks or
set aside the awkward period between
Christmas and the new semester for a time of
independent research rather than mindless
cramming.

Sporadic attempts have been made at the
University in past years to do something
about this problem, but they seem to have
been lost in the bureaucratic maze. One New
Year's resolution that the Calendar and
Scheduling Committee might make is to look
into this problem and not to rest until a
solution has been found.