Dead week is a term used to refer to the week before finals in school. This week is used to let students study, rest and prepare for finals the following week. Blue Valley North, however, chooses to give students a ‘dead day’, where for one day, a week before finals, students won’t be assigned any new work. But is this new change effective?
Personally, I don’t think that dead day is nearly as effective or worthwhile as dead week. While one can argue that you may not need an entire week to study, one day is nowhere near enough time. The idea that students are expected to study a semester’s worth of material and are only given a day to do so is baffling to me.
This year, dead day falls on Friday, Dec. 12. Assuming teachers won’t give any assignments the following days before finals, that leaves students with three days in total where they won’t have any new assignments. While that may sound good at first, that doesn’t mean no work for the week, only no NEW work. If a class has a project that students need to work on, those days likely become work days for that project.
What’s even worse, dead day in general isn’t even a dead day at all; students CAN still be assigned new work. The only thing that the title prevents is getting assigned a test on the day in question. Don’t get me wrong, I am incredibly thankful for the promise of no tests near the end of the semester, but when I have two tests and a presentation throughout the rest of the week, dead day loses its luster.
The only feasible reason I could think of as to why we’d only have a dead day instead of a full week to prepare for finals is for teachers’ sake to finish out course material. Maybe the staff needs time to finish teaching the material necessary for the final, I’ll give them credit for that, but that still doesn’t justify giving out projects the week before finals. Would it not be equally beneficial for teachers to be able to spend a week getting grades in, or even allowing students to get late work in before the end of the semester?
All in all, having a dead day over a week is a terrible choice if you ask me. Students have responsibilities after school, especially when they reach high school. Some people may have jobs, extracurriculars and more that prevent them from studying 24/7 outside of school. A dead week gives those students that don’t have the free time a chance to study during school. If teachers need more time to teach, the best compromise would be to give a dead Friday as well as the following Monday and Tuesday before finals. But still, students have to work on their classwork up until the point of finals, which in turn could cause excess pressure that could make students more stressed for finals. I’m sure BVN has good reasons behind their decisions, but I wish they would reconsider the change from dead week to dead day.
