Summer Vacation? 8 to 4? Not So Much.

Three reasons to teach? June, July and August. Three more? Spring Break and Thanksgiving and Christmas Vacation! This has been the age old mantra repeated by teachers certainly but also, I believe, by those who would denigrate educators. With so much leisure time they say, you don't necessarily need a professional salary but something more "reasonable." The really smart students become something more financially worthy, say, a doctor or lawyer.( Of course, they do have their gigantic student loans to pay off, also, so they need the money more. Right?). Whatever the justifications, the truth about time spent as an educator is incalcuable and doesn't have a clock-punching quality to it. Looking at a average school day of 8 to 4, most teachers I know arrive 30 to 45 minutes before that as a rule. Teachers at the high school level get roughly 25 minutes for lunch or less and one planning period, hopefully, of about 40 minutes. Tutoring is before school and quite often after, and when the planning period or tutoring time is taken by parent meetings, ARDs, 504 meetings, site-based meetings, club sponsorship, faculty meetings, curriculum meetings, tech training, very little planning or paper grading gets done. Teachers at my school must input grades on PowerSchool on an almost daily basis, update their Homework Online, which is lesson plans and PowerPoints and lectures notes for students, and turn in lesson plans on a weekly basis, so much of that must be done before or after school, and that is often from home. So, that 40 hour work week? For the most part, 50 plus hours or more. Add in the exhaustive task of maintaining discipline, teaching difficult concepts over and over again, and the sheer pace of sustained bursts as periods change, and therein will lie the reason so many burnout of the job. Now, as the school year has stretched into June on one end, and there is always the need for dreaded inservices and meetings before school starts, and the school year really starts the second week of August, the days begin to move closer together, and the summer becomes more of an illusion. Throw in week-long trainings or AVID conventions or summer school or Summer Academy, and the time shrinks more. (In a week or so, Amy will go to San Antonio to finish her THIRD week of training.) Watching Amy "wind down" by grading papers on a Friday night, so that she can enjoy Saturday afternoon, answering e-mails from angry parents from home, updating websites during a free moment, the reality, when rest comes, is that I, like so many, am making it on adrenaline and caffeine and sheer desire. The party never really stops.