By Amy Lukac
Opinion Editor

Snowflakes falling gently to the ground on a cold winter morning were once a beautiful sight. A pretty sight it still may be to those who work from home, or take online classes.

Snow days in the college world work in different ways. Sure, college students like us would love a day off to do homework and study, or in reality, to watch Netflix, but what happens when one snow-day leads to another…and another? More work shoved into a smaller time frame.

Is it fair for professors to increase the pace to make up for lost school days? Sure, it’s fair. After all, professors don’t have a direct line to Mother Nature. If they did, I have a feeling it would feel a lot like sunny San Diego, California in the Poconos every day.

However, because there is no way to control the weather, professors have no choice but to squeeze in as much content as they can before finals week comes around the corner.

In grade school, if students end up with more snow days than expected, the school system adds those “make-up” days at the end of the year. Unfortunately, college has a certain number of weeks in each semester, and that doesn’t change.

The way I see it is, college is the next step before “the real world.” It doesn’t really matter what profession you go into when you graduate college; there will always be something unexpected that comes up.

There is, however, a difference between increasing the pace reasonably, and increasing it too much.

The professors I’ve had so far have been very reasonable. They have even asked the class if our workload is getting crazy and stressing us out, and if it happens to be too much, some of them have cut the number of words in an assigned paper, or found other ways to help us out.

Last semester, I heard students in one of my English classes complaining about their professors adding 100+ pages of reading content, along with more papers, and quizzes being scheduled sooner than expected.

In all, I do think it is fair for professors to increase the pace, seeing as we’ll face unplanned bumps in our lives in the future, but I do believe there is a line with the amount of content and speed.

Regardless, professors will assign what they want to assign when they assign it, we students need to be prepared to skip a night of partying, or Netflix binging, and focus.

Email Amy at:
alukac@live.esu.edu