For years, students have lamented with the same old song and dance when it comes to Dead Week. Tunes of complaints about projects and papers due the week before finals, suggestions never becoming true petitions and an overall dissatisfied reaction have become normal when Dead Week, the week before finals, rolls around.

So a resolution that will go before the entire Student Government Senate on Wednesday concerning Dead Week, trying to legitimately limit the amount of work that is due during that week, is promising, to say the least.

In fact, it’s the most realistic approach in actually giving Dead Week legitimacy as a seriously easier week since students have brought up the notion of changing the week. The resolution is SG, at its best, working to change things that really affect the entire student body.

But just because the resolution is the most realistic approach so far, doesn’t mean there is any inkling that change is imminent.

After passing in the SG Senate, the issue moves to a Faculty Senate committee, then to the Faculty Senate as a whole. Getting students on board isn’t a problem, but the faculty may not be as receptive to the idea.

Not all of them, but a few. Every one knows the professors who have settled into their own refined system and syllabus, which may entail back-loading all their assignments in a given semester. You know the type, the ones who have the same exact unrevised syllabus semester in and semester out, with the previous year’s date scratched out and filled in correctly with pen.

In a meeting with the Kernel editorial board, SG President Tyler Montell said that the current resolution has faced very little opposition. That’s surely to come when a few grandfathered, tenured professors catch wind.

Notthing, not even the simplest and easiest of resolutions, pass without any opposition or debate. And while it’s not uncommon to breeze legislation through the SG Senate, the Faculty Senate isn’t as simple. Revisions can only make the resolution stronger, but how much criticism before it will break?

Student support is necessary to make this idea blossom into reality. A groundswell of student support may convince a few faculty, but to think an overwhelming student voice will bully the Faculty Senate into changing Dead Week is ambitious. But it’s also admirable.

The onus doesn’t just fall on Montell and SG. It is not beneficial to faculty nor students when projects and papers are assigned a week before final exams. Logic says students would finish a project way before the due date if they have a whole semester to work on it. But that logic rarely applies to the reality of a college student’s life.

Grading tons of work, while at the same time creating a final is also a heavy, unnecessary burden on professors. Move that paper to midterms. Let the final stand alone, and let not only students, but also yourself, breathe a little easier while the semester winds down.

If Montell and Joe Quinn, the chief architect of the Dead Week resolution, hope to really bring change to Dead Week, they should start with the faculty, who will still be here when Montell is no longer president and many of us are no longer on campus. The students who remain will still be in support of less work the week before finals.

Change to Dead Week can happen, but only if it becomes more than just another complaint.

Otherwise, we will forevermore end the semester to the same old tune.

And that’s a sad song to sing.