For those of us who still care about Thanskgiving and validate it as a holiday worth celebrating, it is now officially Christmas season. Nothing is more indicative of festive celebration than Saturday final exams, precariously icy sidewalks and the permacloud. We Notre Dame students return from Chicago and the depths of our beds in our dorms to the final three weeks of the fall semester, a gauntlet of terrible challenges — both academically and environmentally.
Because of our new holy day of obligation, a potential home football playoff game, we now have a day of final exams on Saturday, Dec. 14. It was a great surprise to me when I saw a 10:30 a.m. Saturday final exam on my schedule, and I suppose it too would be a great surprise to other students who learn about this final exam on Friday, Dec. 13. Whatever the case, I wonder how effective a widespread boycott of Saturday exams would be. Perhaps we students would protest these exams by doing what we normally do to keep holy “our” Sabbath: sleeping. Sleeping, civilly disobediently as it were. Perhaps our professors may sympathize with our religious adherence, offering us to take the final exam at a later day, but what is more likely is that they will all fail us.
On top of that, the nonconsecutive reading days are not a way of helping students balance out their studying time, but rather they are a way spacing out finals such that there are as little “legitimate” time conflicts as possible. A legitimate time conflict entails more than two finals scheduled in a day or more than three finals in a 24-hour period. In most students’ unfortunate cases, they would be taking an amount of exams that reaches this upper bound without actually crossing it. In my most unfortunate case, I will be spending four hours of my evening on Thursday, Dec. 19, not on a hot date at Rohr’s but rather an ugly date at DeBartolo Hall that concludes at 9:30 p.m. Perhaps, my exaggerations seem off-putting and whiney to you, my reader, and in that case, I strongly encourage you to sit four hours in a musty, cramped DeBart classroom for 4+ hours. Pull a few all-nighters. Drink some of DeBart’s lead-flavored water. Eat at the dining hall. And you’ll soon figure out how fast you go stir-crazy during an exam.
As for the environmental challenge of the next three weeks, I point your attention outside to the sky. Imagine a creative 6-year-old drawing a picture of a landscape, except his Crayola crayon pack did not come with the colors red, yellow, orange or green and he forgot to color in the sky. That’s South Bend weather. When people ask me what it is like living in South Bend, I often point out the fact that the town strikes me as a paradigmatic Midwestern town that somehow feels like it is “stuck-in-time.” When I say this, I am chiefly referring to the homely houses that have been renovated since they were built in the 40’s. But perhaps I can extend the “stuck-in-time” analogy to the fact that it looks like a black and white movie when I step outside. Moreover, it would genuinely terrify me if I walked into class one day and everybody in the room was a white man with a Transatlantic accent, donning a trench coat and top hat.
People often remark that it is the people that make the place — these people often do not have original ideas. But I argue that these next three weeks of the semester and by extension Christmas, are characterized by both the dreadful and wonderful things in life. I am a massive supporter and celebrator of Christmas and all things Christmas, but I realize that there is some slogging I have to do before I get there. It would be foolish to say that the Christmas season is magical simply because of the wonderful things that come with the holiday. It would also be foolish to write off Christmas because of all the dreadful things that happen around it. I prefer to strike the balance, acknowledging that the dreadful things of the next three weeks all can have profound meaning. If I offer up all my time, toils, tribulations and trials of the next three weeks as a sacrifice for the rewards of time spent with family and friends in celebration, then these challenges do not seem so daunting, and much less like challenges. Perhaps these challenges, academic and environmental, are opportunities to persevere so that I can merit rewards from St. Nicholas, among others.
Jonah Tran is a junior at Notre Dame studying finance and classics. He prides himself on sarcasm and never surrendering. You can file complaints to Jonah by email at jtran5@nd.edu.
