Your professor is teaching a class on the design of the academic year. Write a post responding to the professor's question. Express and support your opinion and contribute to the discussion in your own words. An effective response has at least 100 words.
Dr. Ingrid Solberg
The long summer break is a survival from an agricultural calendar, and several universities are now debating whether to shorten it and spread the teaching across three shorter terms. Supporters say a shorter break would reduce the forgetting that happens over an idle summer and would let students finish sooner. Opponents say the summer is when research, paid work, internships and recovery actually happen, and that the proposal treats teaching as the only thing a year contains. Should the summer break be shortened? Why?
Marta
Shorten it. Three months is not a break, it is a gap, and everyone comes back in October having lost the habit of working as well as a good deal of the content. The argument about internships proves my point rather than the other side's: those are available in the summer because the universities emptied it, and employers would move them if the calendar moved.
Daniel
Marta is right that employers would adapt and wrong about what would fill the space. The people who use the summer for research are not students, they are staff, and they use it because it is the only stretch of the year with no teaching in it. Spread teaching across three terms and the research year disappears, which nobody proposing this has costed.