The week before finals, notoriously known as dead week, is now upon us. It is as if it were a national holiday, the week before finals when college students throughout the nation are busy cramming for exams, writing hundreds of pages in papers and forgetting altogether the importance of hygiene.
All this is the result of the immense pressure students feel to achieve the desired grade they need to prove their intelligence come finals week. During this week the ugliness of what education does to students comes out and shows the deterioration of the student and exposes the mechanical work that becomes learning and memorizing in order to achieve a good grade.
But this message is specifically for students: don't forget that you are human.
It's very easy to get wrapped up and getting a good grade and making sure that you get the best grade that you can so that you can prove to others that you are intelligent, but that is not the main point. We must remember that we, like all others, are only human, capable of making mistakes and being imperfect.
It is our imperfections that make us human. We cannot achieve perfection without pushing ourselves to an inch of our sanity, and even then, we realize that we can never reach perfection.
That is what dead week is.
During this time you have these huge exams and term papers in which you are supposed to show all the knowledge that you have acquired in the past couple of weeks and somehow stored away, so you can verbatim repeat it come exam day.
There's this huge pressure on students during this time, yet nobody realizes the emotional damage that it has and, to some, the physical damage. Lasting a whole week feeding off of snacks and not being hydrated with anything other than coffee or other caffeinated drinks to stay awake and cram in as much as possible, because we NEED that good grade, but in reality we don't.
It is important to remember that we are all humans and humans are imperfect and, it is through our imperfection, that it makes us wonderfully human. Our grades are not what define us nor is that where we're going to stop.
What defines us is the role we play in society and how we choose to show who we are through our actions and through what we teach others.
So this dead week remember it's okay to just take time and breathe. Finals week is not the end of the world. It may seem like it, but it is not.
After every dead week and after every finals week, the sun does come up and we realize that we have become a little bit stronger and a little bit smarter whether or not there are test scores to tell us so.
We are all together doing what we need to do to stay strong during dead week because finals week is almost upon us, but fear not- it will soon be over and the sun will come up again.
