Breaking News- UIUC Instructors Have Spring Break Plans

By Kelsey Gould on March 22, 2014

Every student has experienced it- running into an instructor or TA at the grocery store or the coffee shop and being feeling surprised and subsequently having to remind yourself that our teachers don’t live in their classrooms or offices. Because we only know them as the people that stand in the front of the room and pour their knowledge into us, it’s easy to assume that our teachers live to educate us and that Spring Break for them is just a week to spend waiting for the students to come back.

Interestingly enough, it is not so! Several instructors, including Professor Follis from the journalism department and Professor Irigoyen-García from the Spanish, Italian & Portuguese departments both agree that Spring Break is needed by the instructors as much as the students. “Everybody needs it.  Everyone needs to rest and catch up,” said Follis, who will be visiting her sister in Charleston, South Carolina over break. Irigoyen suggests that the students and professors need breaks for different reasons, as he will be using his break to do research and catch up on paperwork and students will probably not be using it to do research and catch up on paperwork. For students, Spring Break is a week to spend time with family, read books, travel and try to forget about the stress of being a student at the University of Illinois.

Imagining how an instructor will spend their Spring Break is shaped partly by how they use the class time on the day(s) before break and the work they assign for the week off. Cancelling class, making class optional, or offering extra credit for being in class on the day before break is proof that some professors are just as antsy for break to begin as we are, or are at least understanding of some student’s need to fly the coop before the break officially starts. It’s not a student’s first instinct to wonder what their professors will be doing while we’re all in Florida or Colorado or somewhere, but maybe when classes reconvene we can all try to accept that they probably feel about the same as we do about being back in the classroom.

Sources:

Jennifer E. Follis

UIUC Journalism Professor

Javier Irigoyen-García

UIUC Spanish Professor

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