Final Exams and 24×7 Quiet Hours

(I’ve become fascinated with what will be on the white board in our dorm lounge each morning when I wake up)

Throughout this year we have often felt like strangers in a strange land… living on a college campus as a family of five… living amongst them, and with them, but being not entirely one of them. I’ve often felt like we’re foreigners in a new exotic culture; just like when we travel to distant places– we try to watch and observe, try to pick up on the nuances of the behaviors and the subtleties of the interactions, try to follow along as best we can, interpreting and translating, trying to make sense, attempting to understand what and why and how everything that is happening is happening. It is intriguing, and fascinating, and curious — we’re living, fully immersed, in a new culture — we are in it, but not wholly part of it. So we see it with a confusion and clarity that can come only from being semi-outside it while also in it.

There is no time during which this sensation has been more profound than during the final exam periods.

At the end of the fall semester, when the final exam period kicked in, we were truly stunned by the dramatic shift in the entire tone/feeling/culture of the campus. Having been to college ourselves (granted– 20 years ago, and granted– at a much different college), and having both been through PhD programs, and with me having taught at Lehigh for the past eleven years, Braydon and I thought we knew a bit about what to expect. But no. We had no idea. And now, at the end of spring semester, as we are finishing out the second final exam period of the year, we are once again completely stunned by this strange land we find ourselves in.

If I had to narrow it down to one word, final exams at Lehigh is: intense. Classes end, and then, according to university policy, “quiet hours will be in effect 24 hours a day beginning at 1:00 a.m. following the last day of classes each semester.” This may (or may not?) have been the official rule where I went to college– even if it was, nobody actually abided by it. So, I never anticipated that it would truly be honored here either. But I was so wrong. Here, at Lehigh, people take it completely seriously.

Classes end on a Friday. The students party it up that Friday night. But when we wake up the following morning, BAM!, it is like a whole different place. It is quiet. All the time. All day long. All night long. Everywhere. The tone drastically changes. Students are solemn, serious, sober (literally, and figuratively). There is studying going on everywhere, all the time, all day, and all night. They sleep irregularly, and only in short 3-4 hour chunks of time, but not necessarily during the nighttime. A campus normally very focused on health (typically lots of exercising and relatively healthy eating habits) suddenly becomes barren of these things; Dominoes delivery goes into full tilt, protein drinks become some people’s main form of sustenance, exercising reduces dramatically, alcohol consumption plummets, the illegal taking of prescription stimulants rises exponentially, Red Bull and coffee and cases and cases of bottled iced tea are consumed.

It is a pressure cooker. We watch as students we know and love — who are usually quite steady and relatively healthy individuals — grow pale in the face and bloodshot in the eyes. They have a hard time carrying on a conversation if it is about anything other than school work and exam schedules. They study so hard. All the time. It is truly astounding. It is also disconcerting.

While it is amazing (truly, awe-inspiring), to see these young people be so driven, eager, and focused, it is also troubling. What has made them so fixated on the seriousness of, and cramming for, exams? I worry about it. Because of the particular historical period of time during which they’ve been growing up, they’ve been socialized in a culture that has been high-stakes testing them since they were five. They’ve been taught that the test is end-all-be-all. And then they reach Lehigh, and their professors here keep ratcheting it up, higher and higher, the sky’s the limit as to how much pressure is layered on. Their parents call them to inquire about their classes, their grades, their exams. Graduate schools up the anti with constantly escalating prerequisite test scores to get in. Employers want to see GPAs. Students absorb it. The emphasis on the test become all consuming.

Some of them have developed coping strategies that are scary and devastating (popping Adderall; obsessive compulsive Facebooking; binge eating and purging). Most of this goes on in private, behind closed doors, so I only hear about it and don’t directly witness it.

What we see much more is that (thank goodness!), some of them have developed coping strategies that are healthy and good. It has been during the final exam periods that we’ve seen the bambinos’ toys be played with the most; on sunny days this past week we’ve seen many students taking a break to listen to music through their earphones and sit for a few minutes on the lawn with their faces tilted toward the sun; our piano, which is always in our building’s lounge, is played more during final exams than the rest of the year combined. The music pouring from that piano is sometimes the only sound we hear early in the morning.

It is a hard balance to strike: to study hard, to be ambitious to compete and achieve, but to also honor your whole self. I’ve been trying hard to talk through this with the bambinos as they too have been fully immersed as strangers in this strange land. “It is important to work hard,” I try to tell them, “but it is also important to keep a hold of yourself.”

Kyle and Owen, especially, have become fascinated by it all. “They study so much!,” they keep saying, “Why do they study so much?” We try to talk about it. They are particularly intrigued by the athletes– the fact that these guys, whom they worship on the field and on the court, are just as much accountable for their classes and exams as any other student, is mind blowing (honestly, it is mind blowing to me just as much as it is to K & O; knowing what some of these students pour into their sports, it is beyond my comprehension how they manage with the full academic burden too).

The other day after school I told the bambinos that we were going to take a little field trip to one of the libraries. We’ve been to the libraries many times, but never during final exams. But we’ve been hearing constantly, “I’m going to the library to study,” so I thought we should go take a look.

Intense. It really comes down to that again. The place was absolutely packed. We walked through a couple of the floors to get a good look– every seat taken, every study carrel inhabited, every computer in full use. The silence — and just the sheer intensity — was astounding.

They have a program here at Lehigh during final exams that takes place in the library: They bring puppies in (dogs being trained to become service animals), and encourage ‘Stress Reduction Study Breaks’ to play with the puppies (numerous studies have shown that pets significantly decrease stress). As we walked through the library, the bambinos caused a little commotion. The reaction from students seemed to me mixed: Many seemed very perturbed and annoyed by the presence of children walking through, many were so focused on what they were working on that they never even looked up, and some took a breather and smiled ear-to-ear at the simple sight of them (no kidding). I had 3 different students stop me to ask: “Is this part of the stress reduction program? Like the puppies? You’re bringing the kids through to break up the stress?” “No,” I said, “we’re actually just taking a look at the library scene during finals.” “Oh,” they all responded flatly, “ok.”

While we were there we saw one of K & O’s basketball idols, Gabe Knutson, studying at a cramped table full of notebooks and laptops and textbooks. This was a powerful experience for my boys. Gabe is a good guy, and he knows the boys. He stopped studying for a few minutes to fool around with them and make their day. “Wow,” they said afterwards, “Gabe was studying super hard.” “Yes,” I said, “he was.” He’s about to graduate, and will then most likely go on to play professional basketball in Europe.

Later that night, after dinner, K & O had homework to do. They wanted to “study hard” and — in their words — “train for when we’re in college having finals.” We found them on the 4th floor of our building, in a small study lounge that is rarely used up there, with their spelling words for the week, working harder on those words than we’ve ever seen them work on any homework before.

Strangers in a strange land, that is what we are.

24 hours a day, during a 10-day period, twice a year, we shush our three kids round the clock, we have to remind them incessantly to “respect the students’ studying!,” and we watch and observe as everyone around us goes into this intensive mode of operation. We watch and we learn. All that we’re learning, I do not know. I just know that we are learning — all of us.