Claire is not in school...

[amles80]

I have a question college/university studies; I don’t really know how these are organized in the U.S. I mean, is it normal to have maybe one or two days a week with no classes, when you’re supposed to study by yourself (in theory) but you can do whatever you feel like because there’s no supervision

Comments

[darthfox]

Yes - fifteen hours (per week) is a normal full-time undergraduate course load at most universities. Twelve is okay, especially if as you say there's practice time, lab work, or what have you. (Or if you've got a job or an internship, e.g.) Nine probably busts you down to part-time status, which can have implications for loans, housing, and other things - scary! But those fifteen hours can be distributed throughout the week (three classes that meet for an hour each on MWF and two that meet for an hour and a half on TR, for example), or Monday through Thursday, or just MWF, or just Tuesday-Thursday if you're very brave and can handle being in class for seven or eight hours with very little break :-) .

It is also absolutely unremarkable for a parent not to know the intricate details of a kid's weekly class schedule.

I'd spell it "hooky", but I don't think it's wrong to use an 'e'.

Spring break can fall any time from the beginning of March through Easter Monday, depending on the religious affiliation of the university. (At mine we had ten days in the middle of March and all of Holy Week, which for those of us who aren't Catholic basically meant two spring breaks, which was awesome.) If you're committed to Thanksgiving time, it's so normal to have the day after Thanksgiving off that I'm going to go ahead and say it's unheard-of not to. (Even the University of Chicago, which has only one holiday per quarter, has the day after Thanksgiving.) So nobody would wonder why a college student wasn't in class on that day. Some universities have a "fall break" of a few days or up to a calendar week in the autumn - this would likely be before Thanksgiving, though, probably some time in October (especially as semesters are starting earlier and earlier in August) because there isn't an awful lot of time between Thanksgiving and the end of the semester; final exams can take place over a couple of weeks and they've got to be wrapped up before Christmas, so putting another break between Thanksgiving and finals wouldn't make sense. ... Unless you're one of the universities that doesn't do exams for the first semester until January, I guess, but even then.

Anyway, though, I think your character could probably run into his daughter and wonder why she wasn't in class and have her say something like "I'm done at 11 on Tuesdays" (or whatever) with complete plausibility - no need to get into a break situation, because as someone downthread says, kids often come home for those and a parent would be more likely to know the general semester schedule than the kid's weekly schedule anyway.