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The Paly Voice

The Student News Site of Palo Alto High School

The Paly Voice

The Student News Site of Palo Alto High School

The Paly Voice

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Dead Week Must Kill Correctly

There is too much homework during dead week, or there always has been in past years. My fear is that this year will be the same.

I hear that the Paly administration will be changing Dead Week next year. They are planning to replace the name Dead Week with Review Week, and rephrasing the rules so as to make them more clear to both students and teachers. When I first heard this proposal, I was sure that this would solve the problem. However, lately I heard one of my teachers mention that since Dead Week was now called Review Week, none of the rules mattered anymore, so she could give tests on the two review days. What this teacher was thinking is unclear, but it is obvious from this statement that not all teachers are aware of the enormous stress that’s put on the students during this week.

I feel that the only way to relieve the enormous pressure that students feel during the week before finals week, whatever it may be called, is to enforce its rules by whatever means possible.

The student handbook says regarding dead week: “Major projects should not be due during finals. There should be at least two days set aside for review for finals, and no major tests at least two days before finals begin.”

Notice that nowhere in the above statement does it require teachers to kill their students with last minute tests and projects; in fact, it says specifically not to do so.

Last year, my situation during Dead Week was unacceptable. One of my teachers gave me a project due during dead week, claiming that because it was not assigned during dead week, the rules did not apply. Okay, I guess this is fair, since I could have finished the project some time before. But it’s unfair to explain what the assignment is at the beginning of dead week, even if the assignment was actually assigned earlier.

In another class, I had a major test toward the end of Dead Week, in addition to a final. In most of my classes, there were no two days put aside for review. Instead, those days were spent trying to rapidly teach the last bit of material that I was to know for the final.

Each of the above situations violates the school policy. I hear a lot of other complaints from fellow students about Dead Week, leading me to believe that this is a problem that needs to be addressed. It’s unacceptable to expect all the students to do reasonably on a final they did not get sufficient time for which to study.

Perhaps there is a very smart person out there who can get an A on every final without studying at all, but most students are not like that. Dead Week is killing the wrong thing; instead of killing some of the stress, it’s killing the students.

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