Student-Teaching over Spring Break

While I don’t mind having to student-teach over the college’s break (I get a week’s break in February and another one the first week of April), I do certainly mind the conditions under which I have to stay on campus. To those of you that don’t know (obviously, most essentially lower classmen that don’t have vehicles and will be student-teaching in the future), if you are student-teaching over Spring Break and consequently need to stay on campus, you may not stay in the residence hall in which you already live, anyway; you have to unnecessarily move to Hart, an utter waste of time. I’d really like someone try to explain to me why this is necessary because honestly, I have played out every possible theory in my mind, and I’ve ultimately debunked every single one.

Hart is open, anyway, because that’s where international students reside, and Residence Life shouldn’t have to ask any more RAs to monitor residences and ensure that they have permission to be here than necessary, and that’s true, but we are adults; there shouldn’t be any reason why we can’t live in our respective residence halls without RAs and DAs on duty. Because international students will be staying in Hart and Hart will therefore be open, anyway, Hart’s doors will be the only ones that will be open to students that need to stay. Again, that’s true, but if you can program my ID to open Hart’s doors, you can program it to open my own residence hall’s doors, and I’m sure that it’s within Residence Life’s capability to program only the IDs of students that will be staying over the break. That’s about it; I honestly can think of nothing else, and in my opinion, I’ve successfully debunked every possible reason that I’ve presented.

Why does it matter so much to me? Well, I’m not looking forward to this as it is; I’m going to be here for nine days with nothing open (not the gym, not the library, not even a single dining hall), and essentially no one here that I know, and I would imagine that even that amount of people will be relatively minimal, so this campus is going to be a ghost town to me, on which there will be absolutely nothing to do. So, the least that could be afforded me is the familiarity and the comfort of my own room, the one in which I’m paying to live. I don’t even think that I get a room in Hart; from my understanding, I get a lounge on the fifth floor. It seems so utterly ridiculous that I have to waste time moving when my own room is going to be empty the entire time, especially since I will likely have somewhere important to be on Friday night (my school’s musical) and I also have to somehow set time aside to take two or three different trips walking belongings that I will need over the course of nine days from Sheldon to Hart; everyone that I’ve spoken to about this agrees that it is ridiculous.

Yet another reason that I care is that like I said, no dining hall will be open, so I will be responsible for preparing my own meals. This means that I will be having to make trips to the store to purchase items and will be unnecessarily further away from Fastrac and Kinney’s. I know that it must seem like I am an annoying person that loves to complain, but I really do think think that this is ridiculous. My Friday afternoon and evening will be spent moving belongings when I shouldn’t have to do that, when I already have a place to stay. I sincerely hope that in the future, Residence Life will at least look into amending this ridiculous standard and maybe even allow future students that need to stay on campus to remain in their respective residence halls so that, unlike me, they will not be drastically inconvenienced by being made to complete extremely unnecessary tasks such as removing belongings and acquainting themselves with a new environment when they should not have to do that.