Finals week always represents stress. Final research papers, cumulative examinations and high expectations circulate around campus numbing the student body into a sleep-deprived, anxiety-riddled mess. Finals were the most terrifying part of freshman year for me and for multitudes of my friends, and the concept still strikes up a feeling of inadequacy within me. Whitman (and this is perhaps one of the few aspects in which Whitman is like the real world) is finely attuned to performance, and finals are our measure of that.

The solution that most schools apply to this situation is a break. A period of rest and study that allows students to adequately prepare for the gauntlet they’re running. At state schools, most of the time this takes the form of a “Dead Week,” with either no classes at all, or a week of classes for which no homework is assigned. You’re still expected to show up, perhaps to review your notes in class and: gasp: prepare for those final exams, but you don’t have any reading, any papers or any problem sets.

At Whitman, the solution is Reading Day. We take one day to cram all of the knowledge we’ve accumulated over the semester into our brains and pray that it won’t fall out. Luckily for us, in fall semester that Reading Day falls on a Saturday. Since finals are sometimes scheduled on Saturdays, we get that weekend day all to ourselves. Thanks, Whitman.

I have spoken to teachers, to students, to staff and to parents (mine, to be fair). The overwhelming sentiment is this: Weekends are not school days. Weekends are not work days. They are a time when you rest and prepare for the next grueling week in academia, or in cleaning up after academics, or what have you. Weekend finals are ludicrous. The derivative the facts here is that we shouldn’t have to get a day off from finals on the weekend. We should already have that day, and we should get another one.

The fact that finals aren’t scheduled on Sunday speaks to my point. The Administration (or whoever schedules finals, classes, etc.) seems to have no problem with the Christian-normative “day of rest,” but they don’t seem to agree with other Sabbath traditions which hold Saturday as holy. Isn’t that odd? If we see fit not to hold finals on Sunday, what does that say about Whitman College? Wouldn’t it make sense to avoid assigning final examination work over the weekend altogether?

My argument is this: Finals should not be scheduled on weekends, and therefore, weekends should not be fair game for reading day. We get one day: a single day to rest and prepare without any of the burdens of learning the next thing on the syllabus, and when that day falls on a Saturday, I know I’m not alone in feeling cheated.

I’m saying to Whitman: Move finals off of weekends, and give us some real time off to prepare. And when I say time off, there are connotations with that: it means sacrificing opportunities, and I’m okay with that. I’m okay with sacrificing a Monday so that I can excel or have more time to finish studying for Tuesday. I’m okay with going away for Winter Break one day later.

And really, what does it hurt to take one more day? Syllabi will be complete, teachers should be done grading things and should have returned those things to their students to study for exams. Students are going to be here anyway. Who is hurt by taking a different day and keeping the weekends (relatively) work and stress free? Who is hurt by taking a little real time off to study?