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Time off work doesn’t always mean a perfect break for professors

For many people, the holidays have always been something to look forward to. For students, this means time away from school and for others, it can mean time away from work. 

This year, at McMaster University, student examinations end officially on Dec. 22, 2021, with winter classes beginning on Jan. 10, 2022. While professors technically have the same time limits when it comes to class dismissals, they spend a large majority of break bringing their courses to fruition. 

Courses often require a lot of planning leading up to the first class, but the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in professors planning for online classes since March of 2020. 

Now, for the upcoming winter semester in 2022, there is going to be a transition to an almost entirely in-person learning format, which can mean a shift in planning for professors yet again. What this planning looks like will differ depending on the course. 

Joe Kim, an associate professor at McMaster under the department of psychology, neuroscience and behaviour, spoke about how the IntroPsych team at McMaster had already had a relatively hybrid learning style prior to the pandemic as they were using virtual modules. Kim explained that planning for the upcoming semester was close to completion. 

Krista Howarth, an assistant professor at McMaster under the department of kinesiology, explained that, although a large majority of her course planning had been completed, there were still things like the Avenue course shell that needed to be activated and then formatted. 

To Howarth, the way her course appears on Avenue is important, as it is an essential means of communication to her students. She talked about how it would have been nicer to have a longer winter break so she can better prepare for the winter semester.

“I do wish there was more time between term one and term two and even last year, there was a survey that went around and [asked], ‘Would you guys mind if we sort of started the term later this year?’ to give everyone more time. Not just the students, but also [so that] the faculty have more time to get ready for term two,” said Howarth.

“I do wish there was more time between term one and term two and even last year, there was a survey that went around and [asked], ‘Would you guys mind if we sort of started the term later this year?’ to give everyone more time. Not just the students, but also [so that] the faculty have more time to get ready for term two,”

Krista Howarth, Assistant Professor

Though professors spend time planning, many also try to balance spending time with family and friends over the holidays. 

For Kim, the holidays are a chance to be closer with his family. He talked about the variety of games they play, whether that be Sorry!, Dominoes, Clues or Jenga. He also talked about the importance of good food, exercising and binge watching television shows to help create a relaxing break.

“The holidays means the end of semester, so it is a chance to rest, regenerate and spend a lot of time with family. For my daughter, I think she just loves the holidays because everyone is together in the same house so we have time for lots of games,” said Kim.

“The holidays means the end of semester, so it is a chance to rest, regenerate and spend a lot of time with family. For my daughter, I think she just loves the holidays because everyone is together in the same house so we have time for lots of games,”

Joe Kim, Assistant Professor

Howarth also spoke about how excited she is for the upcoming holidays. 

It’s a hard earned break that she always looks forward to because she gets time to spend with her family. Her family loves to do puzzles together as she said it was their own form of relaxation. 

Howarth also discussed how few days she actually takes off during the winter, spending the rest of the days working towards the first day of winter semester.

“I don’t often get to spend as much time as I would’ve liked over the holidays with my family, [but] at least I do get to take a little bit of time off to do some things with my kids and my other family members . . . Most years I take off Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing day and I’ll spend that at my parents’ house. I go with my kids and we just hang out there and do our typical Christmas celebrations,” said Howarth.

“I don’t often get to spend as much time as I would’ve liked over the holidays with my family, [but] at least I do get to take a little bit of time off to do some things with my kids and my other family members,"

Krista Howarth, Assistant Professor

Both Kim and Howarth shared advice for students on how to have a balanced winter break. They stressed the importance of how taking a break is essential to wellbeing. 

Kim shared how it is good to be productive, but that there are realistic ways to achieve this. He suggested making a list of things one hopes to finish during the break and to ensure that they are realistic goals.

Kim shared how it is good to be productive, but that there are realistic ways to achieve this. He suggested making a list of things one hopes to finish during the break and to ensure that they are realistic goals.

The upcoming break is a much needed holiday for not only students but also professors. Many use this time to spend quality time with their families. Though rest is their main goal, many professors still find themselves spending a large majority of their break planning for the next teaching semester.

C/O Yoohyun Park

The importance of self-care and managing school and other stressors

By: Anna Samson, Contributor

About halfway through every semester, Canadian postsecondary students get one week off from school. Known as a mid-term recess, or reading week, this week is meant for students to catch up on class material and assignments. It is also used as a break so that students can take some time to rest before entering the homestretch of the semester.

This year, at McMaster University, reading week for the fall 2021 semester ran from Oct. 11 to 17. 

The break is a chance for many students to spend time with family and friends. Like most fall semester reading weeks, this year’s reading week aligned with Thanksgiving weekend. In the winter semester, it aligns with Family Day. Both holidays offer good opportunities for students to reconnect with their loved ones.

Aside from seeing friends and family, students can use the break as a chance to do some self-care that they may have slacked on in lieu of schoolwork. This can include getting more sleep, taking long baths, spending time in nature, journaling, doing hobbies or just going out and having fun.

Yuka Abe, a fourth-year kinesiology student, spent her break reconnecting with family and friends. She also got some rest and devoted time to leisure reading. 

“I did read more, I think, which I haven’t done in a while. So, that was pretty nice, just reading for fun and not like school readings,” said Abe.

Since fall of 2019, students have had reading weeks that were filled with health anxiety and uncertainty due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Fall of 2021 is the first reading week since the pandemic started where students are not stuck at home. As places open back up and people get fully vaccinated, students now have more options regarding how they choose to spend their reading week.

Zeinab Khawaja, a Health Promoter at the Student Wellness Centre at McMaster, highlights the importance of adequate sleep and rest and not being too hard on yourself throughout the school year. Her major piece of advice for students about managing stress is two-fold.

“One: trusting in your ability to handle things and get the supports that you need, because they exist at McMaster and within your social circles. Two: prioritizing rest. Say ‘this is my cut-off time and I’m gonna do as much as I can by then and then I’m gonna rest guilt-free or go to bed’,”

Zeinab Khawaja

The Student Wellness Centre has services available to students year-round. These include counseling and therapy sessions, both individually or by group, medical care and health promotion and wellness resources. Most services are covered under the McMaster Student Union Health Plan.

As this week off from school falls around the middle of the semester, students are often preoccupied with studying for midterms. Some midterms are due right before reading week, which gives students some time to recharge and recuperate afterward. Other midterms may fall after reading week, which provides students with more uninterrupted time to prepare and revise.

However, although reading week is meant to relieve stress for students, trying to balance productivity and finding time to rest can also induce greater stress for some. 

With one midterm before reading week and two more during the first week back from the break, Abe was one student who felt that the break did not offer enough time for relaxing. 

“I don’t think I was able to relax as much as I could’ve, or wanted to, during the break because I was just thinking about the midterms or like studying for them,” said Abe.

Other students have also expressed similar sentiments in previous years. 

To help organize and manage schoolwork, students can use planners to make note of due dates. Scheduling programs and apps are also great ways for students to make realistic schedules for all the tasks they have to juggle. Most importantly, making time for self-care, including exercise and relaxation, can help reduce stress.

Khawaja emphasizes the need for students to be kind to themselves.

“Forgiv[e] yourself for not completing every single thing you wanted to do and not doing everything at 110%. We’re humans, we can’t constantly be functioning at “100%” and our best looks different every single day,” said Khawaja.

Through self-kindness, rest and realistic planning, students can achieve a healthy balance between their lives and their workload. It is important that students find ways to use the reading week to enrich their minds and bodies and not feel overwhelmed by school.

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For the first time in its history, McMaster instigated a week-long break in the fall of 2015. This marked a major departure from the University’s previous practice which, following advocacy efforts from the MSU, included a short, two-day break added to a weekend at the end of October.

According to Heather Poole, a post-doctoral fellow working with the McMaster Institute for Innovation and Excellence in Learning, many universities and colleges across the country have introduced a midterm break in their fall semesters to help students cope with the stress that tends to accompany the accumulation of midterms, essays and extra-curricular commitments. The break is also intended to help prevent students from dropping out of school.

The addition of a week-long break is in and of itself unremarkable. More and more institutions are adopting the practice every year. “In spite of the fact that this has become a pattern across the country, nobody has really looked at whether it actually helps students to manage stress and whether it helps them academically, and so that’s what we’re seeking to do,” explained Poole.

As part of a team of staff from multiple departments and divisions within McMaster, Poole and her co-researchers have taken to scrutinizing the break from multiple perspectives, asking students, professors and other members of the University’s staff to participate in surveys prior to and after the break last fall, as well as a follow-up survey in January. “We were interested in whether students are actually using this for stress-relief activities, whether they are using it for studying, with those sort of being the goal set out by the University, or whether they are going home to a part-time job or to family responsibilities,” she said. In addition to the surveys, a small number of students volunteered to send the researchers text message updates over the course of their Fall Break, and others had cortisol samples taken before and after the break to examine stress levels as cortisol spikes when a subject is under pressure. Despite the small sample size, Poole commented that a change in cortisol levels was observed, however she would not confirm whether levels increased or decreased as a result of the break.

“In spite of the fact that this has become a pattern across the country, nobody has really looked at whether it actually helps students to manage stress and whether it helps them academically, and so that’s what we’re seeking to do.”

While the group is still analyzing the multiple types of feedback they received, Poole has already been able to make some observations about some of the results, mainly the surveys thus far. Part of these surveys asked students to rate their perceived stress levels as well as check off items from a list of standard “stressors,” such as losing one’s keys or having to write a test. “When we look at what happened in patterns of pre- and post-Fall Break, the number of stressors that students were reporting was lower after the break, so they were actually experiencing … fewer stressful events after the fall break [however] they were reporting higher perceived stress after the Fall Break.” More analysis must be done before these results can be interpreted in a meaningful way, however the preliminary results show that the effects of McMaster’s Fall Break could be more complicated than simply reducing student stress levels. The team hopes to gain more insight into the complexities surrounding stress levels in follow-up focus groups.

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The response rate for the surveys was higher than Poole anticipated.

“People seem to be really interested in it, which is really good and I mean it’s not always that typical in research.”

The questionnaires sent out immediately before and after the break garnered about 2,300 responses each. The January follow-up survey was filled out by about 1,150 students. Of those who responded to the first two surveys, close to 80 percent reported that the Fall Break was beneficial. However, the remaining 20 percent found it to be detrimental on the whole. Poole hopes to look at the latter group with greater focus.

“It’s possible that students in a particular faculty are saying that their stress has increased or maybe it depends on how many assignments or tests they had right after the break,” she explained. This information could be given to instructors to improve how courses are structured.

Much like the students, professors gave a mixed review of the break.

“A lot of professors are saying that it was useful for them personally as sort of prep time, but then others are saying, well it’s kind of too early for that … which was also a thing that came out in a lot of the students comments.”

Due to the extensive planning required to schedule the McMaster school year, students will not see any short-term changes to the structure of their academic year. “I would be surprised if any changes come about based on this research for next fall, but we certainly feel like it’s been a worthwhile study and we’ve gotten a good sampling of the student voice,” Poole concluded. Poole and her team plan to release further results in June.

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By: Jennifer La Grassa

“Stand up. Stretch. Take a walk. Go to the airport. Get on a plane. Never return.” This is one of the more popular memes about studying to pop up in everyone’s least favourite month, November. I dare you try to escape the flood of study memes during this year’s exam season. In that sleep-deprived, “what is life?” state, study memes are the university student’s main form of solace. During fall finals the urge to just hop on a plane is almost unbearable. As temperatures plummet into the negatives and the amount of sunlight continues to decline, the darkness of exams is a repelling force that is enough to push anyone onto a plane headed for a warm destination. Thankfully, the force of “you will fail life” tends to be stronger, and usually acts to keep those within the university population firmly rooted.

Believe it or not, as unhelpful as the above tip may seem, there lies within it a noteworthy statement: “take a walk.” Whether you regularly exercise or not, a mere five minutes of moderate exercise is all it takes to enhance your overall mood. Just think of all that this insinuates; actually don’t think, rest your academically distraught brain and let me delve into the realm of possibilities that this statement holds.

All those times that you end up walking during exam season (be it to the library or grocery store) and feel that your chosen method of transportation is wasting precious study time, think of Jim Carrey’s Grinch waving his hairy green finger while saying “wrong-o.” You may just be doing more good than harm to your studying. That stroll you are engaging in is considered to be light physical activity, which not only counteracts many detrimental health risks posed by long periods of sitting, but also boosts your mood and creative potential. Endorphins, which are one of the countless “feel good” substances within the brain, are released during exercise and are active in reward systems to create a sense of pleasure. Numerous studies claim that being in good spirits can enhance your productivity — mix this with coffee and your studying efficacy may just reach an all-time high.

A properly timed workout session of moderate exercise is known to show a more pronounced effect. Regular exercise promotes brain growth within the hippocampal region (a part of the brain dedicated to memory formation) and prevents brain deterioration. Committed exercisers may also find a stronger sense of satisfaction at the end of a workout. Regardless of how much exercise you normally engage in, just know that even small amounts can help. Amidst the countless hours of studying you will undertake during this year’s upcoming finals, do not feel guilty for the many walks you may take to the fridge for another snack. Instead, consider extending this journey into a light stroll around the house before reaching your food destination. The benefits of that walk could be doing more for your studying than the snack you will grab.

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With the fall break over, students have trudged back to school for the November grind, with the end of the semester in sight.

But next year, a new fall break format is expected to bring drastic changes to the structure of the fall semester at McMaster University.

In the Oct. 19 Student Representative Assembly meeting, lost in the interest in the year-end celebration decision, the SRA voted to recommend a new fall break format for next year. The proposals, brought forward by MSU president Teddy Saull, motioned for either a full week or a two-day fall break, beginning in the fall of 2015.

Following deliberation, members of the SRA voted 18-9-1 in favour of the full week recommendation to the Fall Break Committee. Rather than two separate breaks, the Thanksgiving weekend would be extended into a full week off.

"[The vote] shows that the group wanted it, but since it wasn't a unanimous vote, I think it also shows that there are a lot of different opinions out there, because it impacts every student in a different way," said Saull.

This is the second year of a two-year pilot project that began in the 2013-14 academic year, in which a two-day hiatus helped break up the long stretch of school between Thanksgiving and the beginning of exams. The pilot was reevaluated by a Fall Break Committee consisting of voices at all levels in the university, including the registrar, associate deans of various faculties, and the MSU president. With the approval of the SRA for the committee to pursue the full week, the proposal is expected to go through and be implemented in time for next year, said Saull.

“The Provost, from the feedback that they've heard, is thinking that this is going to go through,” he said. “But it will depend on going through several governing bodies [like] the Provost's Council, and then it has to go to Undergraduate Council, and then Senate, so if [any of them] shoot it down, it wouldn't go through.”

Regardless of the decision, both the full-week break and two-day break were going to require noticeable changes to the semester and testing schedule. A number of programs at McMaster, specifically in engineering, have accreditation requirements that require students to be in class for a certain number of hours, meaning that time has to be taken from other areas of the semester.

In order to accommodate a full-week break, three main changes were proposed by the committee and brought forward by Saull. Move-in for Welcome Week would be pushed earlier to the Thursday and Friday before Labour Day, as opposed to the Saturday and Sunday as has been the case in previous years. In addition, the gap day that currently exists as a buffer between final classes and the exam term would be dissolved, and the time allotted for exams would be shortened from three hours to two and a half, or even two hours.

As Saull explained, these changes are a result of a late Labour Day in 2015; therefore, even a two-day break would still necessitate some combination of the proposed changes for a full week break.

“Next year, any break would be different from this year because of the schedule. The calendar is different next year, as Labour Day and Christmas are closer together.”

Based on the discussions at the SRA meeting, students were also concerned with the impact that an entire week off would have on the schedule of midterms. Concerns largely focused on mental health for students, but it was agreed that a full week off was a more effective break. One benefit is that it allows long-distance and first-year students a good opportunity to be able to go home.

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