Summer Holiday!

It's finally here - six weeks off! It couldn't have come quick enough.

Now what to do?
Holiday? How much?!
Shopping? It's very busy!
Sit at home and look after the kids? Probably!

Don't let any teacher tell you that the best thing about being a teacher is making a difference to all those lovely children in their classrooms. They are lying to you. Holidays is what it's all about, and I'm not too shy to say that 13 weeks per year is very good compared to most peoples' 4 or 5 weeks per year.

There are downsides though:

1. The travel companies kindly bump up all their prices making it almost impossible to actually go anywhere. They don't even offer last minute jobs. The price is often prohibitive if you are paying for more than just yourself - and that isn't a moan about teachers' wages, it's a moan about the legality of the holiday companies' policy of increasing prices hugely.
2. All the kids are off too. This may sound an obvious point, but everywhere is busy and more often than not worth avoiding as a result, unless you particularly enjoying queuing that is.
3. If you have kids, you have to look after them or pay for them to go on some kind of activity scheme, which are often charged at an extortionate rate.
4. You therefore end up having very little holiday at all, unless watching Nick Junior can be classed as a holiday activity.

I'm not moaning really (well, perhaps just a little bit) but even though teachers get a lot of holiday, I think they do deserve it (I'm biased, I know) purely because they have to suffer it with all the human beings they are holidaying from. Not to mention the fact that teaching is actually quite knackering and the fact that there would be very few teachers at all if the volume of holiday on offer was shorter.

I, for one, would not touch the profession with a barge-pole if it weren't for the time off!