Feel Good About Having the Summer Off

The title of this entry seems to be a no-brainer.  Who WOULDN’T feel good about having the summer off?   Well, if you are a teacher, do a simple Google search of “teacher summers off” and prepare to be hated. 

When I first started teaching ten years ago, I felt euphoric right around Memorial Day.   Memorial Day weekend was the light at the end of my tunnel.  It was a light that rescued me from the brink of insanity, and from the career change that I considered many times during those first arduous years.   During the past few years though, the light at the end of that tunnel has become a train filled with tired and cynical people who believe teachers are overpaid and shouldn’t have the summers off.  Some of those passengers are my own friends and family members who don’t want to hear about my summer plans unless they include curriculum writing or teaching summer school.   Around Memorial Day, guilt overcomes my once euphoric state, and I’m sick of it.   

I’ve gotten so much flack from some friends and family members here in Wisconsin during the past few summers that sometimes I would actually prefer some version of year-round school just to avoid confrontations.  Like the time my father-in-law chuckled at my husband’s and my Tuesday plans to take our son to the zoo.   “Must be nice, but some of us actually work for a living.” 

It’s that “must be nice” that gets me every time.  If it’s SO nice, then why didn’t they go into teaching?  Is it because they were turned off by a teacher’s starting salary?  Did they want more than 23 minutes to eat their lunch?  Was the idea of not being able to visit the bathroom whenever the urge struck them unappealing?  Did they want to avoid being on stage every morning at 8:25 prepared to hold 25 students’ interest for 45 straight minutes?  Or maybe they wanted to leave their work AT work and avoid grading barely legible essays for ten hours on a beautiful weekend. 

The list goes on.  But – if it “must be nice”—then I wish they would go back to school, become a teacher and stop giving me an undeserved guilt trip.  In most other developed countries, six weeks’ vacation is standard issue, no matter what your profession.   It’s not the fault of teachers that our country believes two weeks out of 52 is plenty for a tired worker to rest and reboot.  When I return to school in August, I am confident I will be the energetic and enthusiastic teacher I’ve always been.  If I didn’t have my summers off, I would have changed careers a long time ago. I physically and mentally reach my limit by the end of May.   Because contrary to my father-in-law’s opinion, I do indeed work for a living.

And despite his and so many other Wisconsinites’ opinions of me and my colleagues, I refuse to feel anything but good about having the summers off.  My husband, a guidance counselor, recently pointed out to me that we will have the equivalent of roughly four extra years to spend with our son while he’s growing up.   All the criticism in the world won’t take that away.   We know how fortunate we are, and this knowledge makes us work harder and more effectively throughout the school year.  And we feel great about that.  J