Too many holidays

It's another Sunday and we're facing another prospect of another non-working holiday tomorrow. Early this morning my mother received a text message from her research assistant with the news that there won't be work tomorrow. As there is no official announcement at all about such a holiday on the papers or on television, we're still trying to confirm this surprising bit of information. If this is indeed true, this will be at least the third time this school term when we'll have no classes again on a Monday.

This might be good news to students or teachers who would like to have another nice long weekend. With the final exam week approaching, most students are probably trying to rush working on projects due at the end of the term or else teachers are probably trying to catch up on work that has piled up over the past few weeks like unmarked quizzes and unfinished lecture notes.

On the other hand, this will mean another round of make-up classes to make up for time lost which isn't much fun for either party. As most make-up classes are scheduled on Fridays, which is the day of the week when the least classes are scheduled to allow for faculty meetings and the like, students won't probably be looking forward to spending a Friday in campus when they could just have already gone home to their families for the weekend.

I for one will lose a few precious hours on a Friday to make-up classes which I normally spend on making lecture notes and presentations for my classes. This is something that I cannot do during the weekend as I can only work on these on my PC in the office. My laptop here runs on Windows XP but my desktop at work runs on Linux. I mainly use Openoffice to make my lecture notes and presentations and I only have Microsoft Office here in my laptop. Yes, I am aware that I can convert my OpenOffice documents to MS Office documents and vice versa so that I can work here at home as well. But I've found that this is more of an inconvenience. Because the conversion isn't perfect (bullets, spacing and graphics get all messed up), I end up spending more time tweaking an OpenOffice Impress presentation converted from an MS Powerpoint presentation that I'd rather create a slide presentation using OpenOffice at the offset. I learned this the hard way several semester ago when I had to make slides for a course that I was handling for the first time: my right wrist would ache after several hours of using the mouse to highlight this and that text and to redraw this and that graphics.

Second, scheduling make-up classes on Fridays isn't that easy either. I usually have to schedule more than one session of make-up classes since not all my students have a common free time even on Fridays. That means I'd have to hold a marathon of lectures--something I did just this past Friday and which is probably the cause of my sore throat right now. Sigh. I can only hope I don't have to miss any more classes this term simply because I've lost my voice.

Anyway my point is while these longer weekends may give a boost to local tourism (the main purpose for having holidays on the nearest Mondays rather on the day itself) and give each of us more time to spend with our families, it is wreaking havoc on our semestral schedules and making us instructors less efficient at work. Since we now have to cram everything into a four-day work week, it is more likely to make us more fatigued by the time the next weekend comes around. And this will in turn affect our performance at work the following week.

This is simply just another instance where too much of a good thing can be bad. So a holiday once in a while would most certainly be a welcome break. But too many holidays are simply--ah, the irony!--too tiring.