during midterms

and lists are the first step into relieving stress,” Maitre said. “Doing this clears your mind on what needs to be done.”

Prioritization is next up on the organizational to-do list. If you have smaller tasks that don’t require too much time, try to squeeze those in between two classes or at times when you feel a bit more tired, to get them out of the way. This will leave you more time for larger assignments and longer revisions during library study sessions.

Tips for time management

Wisely managing your time during exam season is essential for maintaining a balance between school and your personal life. This goes hand in hand with the organizational tips mentioned earlier. By maximizing your time during the day and leaving some blank slots in your week for personal pursuits, you’ll be able to balance your workload while maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Whether you’re a morning person or a night owl, make sure to allocate time for self-care activities like spending time with friends, exercising, cooking, and getting enough sleep.

Mira Almrstani, U3 Arts, stresses the importance of holding a regular sleep schedule during exam season.

“The time to wake up sets the tone for the entire day, and helps you stay organized and motivated,” Almrstani told The McGill Tribune. “Getting up earlier in the morning means getting things done and out of the way.”

Hard copy agendas or online planners?

Various types of calendars can help to perform, and even then, they can receive a hostile reception. Sometimes these adverse attitudes come indirectly with audience members telling Fabian how brave he is for performing.

“These comments make me kind of feel weird,” Fabian said, collecting his thoughts. “I think what they’re really saying is it would take bravery for them. ”

Fabian now produces his own show called ‘Les Folies Draglesques’ at the Cabaret Mado, a bimonthly show on Thursdays, and performs weekly at the speakeasy Le 4e Mur.

He’s also danced at Unity nightclub for New Year’s, and since 2018, has performed at Montreal Pride in front of some 30,000 people.

“It’s the kind of stage that’s so big they have screens for the people who can’t see what’s happening,” he said.

Fabian intends to keep performing until his body starts to hurt. “I’m 31 now,” he said, chuckling, “[and] this is what I love to do.”

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Planning your time helps you strategize—even if you have to alter your study plans, you will benefit from having previously defined tasks and activities. (sikloernyozes.com) you keep track of your deadlines. While some will find it useful to have an online agenda on their laptops, others will opt for hard-copy planners. Maitre is a big advocate for writing things down.

“It reassures me to write down my todo lists instead of typing it on a computer,” Maitre said. “It feels more liberating to actually jot it down on a piece of paper.”

Although Maitre has leaned more towards the more material side, Almrstani has been using the note-taking application called Notion.

“At the start of every semester, I usually organize my deadlines and readings on Notion. There I can create separate pages and folders for each class,” Almrstani explained. “As the semester rolls out it’s like I created a mini textbook for each course that I can go back to and study.”

Other great online options include Google Calendar or Microsoft To-Do. But whether you choose digital or old-school lists, they are bound to boost your motivation every time you check off a task. From my agenda to yours, a to-do list reassures!

Iremember loving tap dance even before I knew what it really was. Even when I had only heard my mother’s animated description of how tap shoes had metal plates on their soles that I could make new sounds with, it was more than enough to draw me into an unknown world of movement, expression, and history. Something that I knew for sure, though, was that the people around me loved it. Some of my favourite memories with my grandmother are from when I would sit in the kitchen with her before Passover Seders, helping with some of the cooking prep, sorting out the teacups and saucers for coffee or tea—but most importantly, gleefully talking about the new steps I had learned in class that week or the last dance film she saw on Turner Classic Movies. Per haps I already knew it then––tap would remain in my life in more ways than one.

Each step an archive

Tap stands out from several other popular dance styles as a distinctly American dance rooted in histories of en slavement and cultural exchange. The style developed through the melding of several different styles, notably West African step dancing and Irish clog dancing. Until the late 20th century, most historians believed that tap originated from enslaved Africans and Irish indentured servants being influenced by each other’s dancing on Southern plantations. More research has suggested that tap was nurtured in urban environments where different ethnic groups congregated. Both narratives speak to tap as a genre created collectively through community for mation and cultural expressions. For instance, juba, a dance from the Kingdom of Kongo that uses feet-stomp ing and arm-flapping, markedly influenced tap. During the 18th century, various states passed laws outlawing en slaved people from using drums, which were considered a dangerous form of communication that could be used to incite rebellions. Enslaved peoples employed juba and other forms of rhythmic physical movement as media of communication and to cope with the ongoing trauma of slavery.

When I started taking tap classes early in my elementa ry school years, my teacher during the 2010-2011 school year, Maud Arnold, first taught the class about the history of tap dance. Beyond just explaining the history behind the dances she taught us, she also had us do weekly home work assignments where we would research tap videos and come to class prepared to discuss our favourite move ments. When I caught up with Arnold, a professional tap dancer, choreographer, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and producer, she was touched to learn that I still remembered her assignments in such fond detail.

“I always wonder—like today, when I was teaching, I was telling the kids: Tap dance is an African-American art form. What is February? February is Black History Month, tap dance is Black history, period,” Arnold said. “And I’m always like, I wonder if they’re listening, I wonder if they care?”

A major focus of tap dance classes is undoubtedly teach ing pupils new steps and routines. But ensuring that they learn the past that has been preserved in those tap steps invaluably works to contextualize and focalize the history of enslaved people in these lessons. Media that depicts African-American history often only sees their suffering as a worthy subject, obscuring their substantial creative contributions to American entertainment scenes and re instantiating the centralization of whiteness in popular media.

“Tap dance is extremely impactful and extremely pow erful because it was born during a time of oppression, it was created by enslaved people—it carries so much more history and weight,” Arnold said. “You know, we’re lucky now because we can just do it for fun and express ourselves, but imagine a time in which this was the only choreographed and performed by tap dancer Travis Knights that explored how the historical connections between jazz and tap dancing manifest through the physical self. The performance was explicitly framed through a non-Eurocentric lens, firmly centring Black also made waves for its use of vibrotactile devices—specifically, a vibrating vest that would allow deaf and hard of hearing audience members to experience the feeling of tap steps in coordination with sociate with dance and art scenes—both in performers and in audiences—demonstrating how interdisciplinary diences, both in Montreal and around the world. Ableism and any kind of exclusivity in the dance world, Arnold asserts, is fundamentally opposed to her definition of the

“What’s really exciting and special about dance is that it’s a universal language,” Arnold added. “And dance is for everybody: Even if you’re not [non-disabled], if you’re in a wheelchair, you can groove, you can move. We’re all born with a heartbeat, so we all have an innate rhythm, portant when considering tap as an African-American