Word: exam
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...worry-free vacation and a productive, efficient reading period are a stretch at best and imaginary at worst. It's not the workload that really bothers me. It's not even the schedule itself that makes me rue this time of year, because in some ways our post-break exam system is a blessing: no other school I know of gives its students quite this much time to prepare for exams and catch up on reading that got skimmed, forgotten or ignored during the semester...
...worst part is, it's really not so bad-at least it wouldn't be if everyone didn't continue to point out to me just how bad it is. Some of my relatives, who smilingly call our fall semester exam system "torture", unintentionally rub salt in an open wound. Most of the friends I've kept from high school are used to my touchiness on this issue by now. They still ask how long I'll be in town for, but they only raise their eyebrows or pat me comfortingly on the back in response. But by then...
...short-sightedness is amplified by Harvard's disjunct schedule. The exam break that began yesterday creates, in effect, two mini-seasons, in which a single big win seems to make a season, and consecutive losses are a disaster...
...dull my intellectual senses and developed within me a repulsion for anything academic. The endless rounds of frantically scribbling down notes in lecture, memorizing all the possible facts, dates and names of the required text, then regurgitating them for a caffeine-assisted paper or a hand-cramping three-hour exam. All this butter-churning and what's the grand prize? Why the first letter of the alphabet of all things, fancy that...
...easy to get absorbed in our own affairs, especially during reading period, exam week and the like. Whatever our individual sources of tension may be--seminar papers, ill loved ones, cold sores--every one of us is suffering in our own way. The goal is to maintain civility and empathy through it all. Good luck with exams...