With the schedule for next semester, one has to wonder if the current academic grind will become the status quo
After conquering midterms or having midterms conquer them, the University of Tulsa student body now has to look to the next semester, planning courses, sketching out extracurricular time slots and finding out when to scarf down that bagel between classes. However, this and student burnout occur simultaneously , with students and faculty feeling the weight of six weeks without a break. Those already long hours are going to get longer with another month before the five day Thanksgiving pause, with time for more projects, papers and lab reports. In relation to this massive amount of work, it would behoove the gods of TU to test some ideas for alleviating the excessive weight of academics.
Considering the popularity of Tuesday/Thursday classes among the faculty, one idea revolves around shifting Monday/Wednesday/Friday classes into something similar to the current Tuesday/Thursday style. Changing the MWF time blocks from the fifty minute periods to a M/W hour and fifteen minutes system frees up Fridays for students looking for consistent three-day weekends while reducing the number of trips faculty have to take to campus. This would also offer a day dedicated for those longer two hour and 45 minute class blocks and four hour labs. Of course, they do not all have to fall on Friday, but the primary limitation of class schedules lies in these long blocks that prevent students from taking other required courses.
If there is a multi-hour lab only on Wednesday, suddenly one’s schedule becomes reliant on a single timeslot, exacerbating an already-present issue among college students that lies in inconsistent meal and sleep schedules. Reducing the time variations in these slots would help streamline both constructing these schedules and sticking to them.
Similarly, the uneven distribution of classes in the day causes major issues for students pursuing more than one degree or minor. For instance, the single upper level German class in the spring is offered at the same time as the one Intro to Dynamics mechanical engineering section. In this situation, the student either has to take an independent study with a professor from either department or choose not to pursue one of these classes. Smaller departments like foreign languages feel a disproportionate share of this burden, with professors shifting their class times after the course catalog is released in order to find a time that works for as many students as possible. Even then, shifting the class time risks losing more students to different required classes. This example highlights the other primary issue of the university’s stance on scheduling courses: the interesting or required classes are oftentimes scheduled at the same time as other interesting or required classes.
Personally, I felt this most when an in-depth history class discussing the American Civil War was taught at the same time as Dr. Lars Engle’s King Arthur seminar, which was also offered concurrently with the only four thousand level German course covering the Enlightenment and Romanticism. All of these courses could count as a major credit, and I would have loved to take all three of these, but they were offered at the same time in the early afternoon on Tuesday/Thursday, which was a major disappointment.
As a student, the process in which professors bid for their time-slot seems pretty opaque. I understand the faculty have to file for a timeslot, but there seems to be no protections for students or cross-discipline outreach to codify the classes into something more feasible for those with more than one major or minor. The obvious rebuttal for the Arts and Sciences is that one does not have to take specifically these upper level classes, just upper level classes in that discipline, but TU has marketed itself as an institution where students learn what they choose to learn from a variety of potential subjects contained in one field. Instead of having the freedom to choose something unique like King Arthur, I am forced to take another English class in a future semester, gambling on finding something I am interested in as well as the time it is taught.
One possible solution to this problem highlights the role of department chairs. Each chair of a department would have to crack down on professors taking only the preferred time slots, either cajoling or volunteering faculty members to teach at less populated portions of the day. This would not necessarily fix the problem, but a more even dispersion of classes would be an excellent starting point. The next step would see the department chairs gathering together in their colleges and putting their schedules together to see if there are any obvious required class dichotomies, preventing students from being forced to take AS-2001—a class normally taken in the spring of a student’s first year—in their final semester.
The other aspect of the course catalog dropping at this time in the semester focuses on how it emphasizes the long periods of class without breaks. TU, unlike other universities, does not have a Fall Break scheduled for its student body. The intention is to mirror the spring semester schedule, with a long chunk of educational time broken into at the very end with a full week Spring Break. However, last spring was extremely grueling for most students, and while the outside pressures of the pandemic may be lessening, anything resembling the 13 week death march seems to spit in the face of student mental and physical health.
Considering TU could simply start a week earlier in the fall and convert that week of summer into a fall break, it indicates either a brutal insistence on mirroring the supposedly real-world work schedule or a fatal misunderstanding of student health. Students do not seem to have an issue with any of the projects or the rate at which they are assigned, but not having a break to do a mental reset to catch up on reading or sleep or eating drains the tank. There are solutions to these issues, we simply need to ask for them; administrators cannot fix problems if we do not tell them about them.
