Midterm fatigue

At UC, people always used to (and probably still do) hail an approaching midterm break with comments like 'it's high time,' or something to that effect. Although I often shared this feeling, I could never help wondering what would happen without the break. The old and venerable Ruperto Carola¹, standing firm against such modern hupsafladder² as breaks in the middle of term (except if there is a real reason, such as Christmas), presented me with the chance to find out.
I don't know whether it is that I have become accustomed to being able to do nothing for at least one in eight weeks as a consequence of being pampered at school and in college, or that I am just lacking the inner fire that is required to push further the boundaries of human knowledge, or that I am just lazy, but I do notice a distinct drop in motivation, after nine weeks' going. I now need to tell myself to sit down and do my homework, even though the homework itself has not become more or less time-consuming, interesting, boring, or enlightening than it was at the beginning of term.
So, apparently, if this small sample (N = 1) can be taken as representative, the welcoming of the midterm breaks at UC was justified on my part.

¹Officially, the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg.
²Dutch readers unfamiliar with the work of Marten Toonder: shame on you. Non-Dutch readers: hupsafladder is a Dutch word coined in the 1970s by Marten Toonder, a Dutch author whose work enjoys high popularity and quotation rates in my family, roughly meaning the opposite of 'old and venerable'.