The End Is Nigh...

It's at the end of August that you see many teachers start to look miserable. Why? The summer holiday is nearly over.

It's always a bit of a reality check for a teacher that you do actually have to earn your money at some point - the worst thing about getting 6-ish weeks off is the going back afterwards. You're out of routine and can barely remember when you were last in a routine. There's also the fact that most teachers (not all) go in at the end of August to do some marking, planning or just to tidy their classroom. Even though you get so much holiday, the fact that you are in during annual leave leaves a nasty taste.

Having said that it is nice to catch up with a few colleague that you haven't seen and maybe check out how badly your classes did in their GCSEs or A levels, although, for a pleasant change, mine did Ok, despite doing the minimum amount of work. When I say say "well", mean that most got a C grade or above, the mark of a pass in statistician's' eyes anyway. This could lead me off on a tangent, but I will leave that for another day.

I went in for the first time today with the intention of marking some work that I never got around to doing in July and planning a few lessons for the start of term. I managed 50% of my targets, but the horrible 50% (the marking), so I felt as if I'd achieved something, like many 16 year olds currently.

I would say that one doesn't have to be in school to actually do some work. I like to claim that I'm "never off duty" or that the "classroom never sleeps" - with tongue firmly wedged in cheek I hasten to add, but I have had a few ideas over the holidays, one of which I texted my line manager about, which I gave myself a stern talking to about. I think it may have been late at night too, which is even worse. Most teachers do have moments of inspiration during the holidays though, for the follwing reasons: they are more relaxed and they have time to think.

If anyone ever has a go at me for the amount of holiday time I get I offer to do a job swap, which normally makes them recoil at speed, but actually it wouldn't be a bad idea for both teacher and non-teacher. Teaching is a very tiring job during term time, but you get long holidays to counteract the tiredness. This is the main thing that non-teachers struggle to understand, and how would they know after all? It would give parents some idea of what their child and their child's teachers go through on a daily basis though, and might reduce the amount of whiny phone calls from clueless parents about how their child is not getting a fair deal from their geography lessons, even though their child is probably the one who disrupts it. Another story once again.

A good number of teachers have no idea what a job outside of teaching is really like, and whether they would be able to cope in an office environment; what skills they could successfully transfer. This could be genuinely useful for a teacher who wants to get out of the profession, as they would know what they could do. I can hear those non-teachers saying:

"You get plenty of holidays, so do it then". Fair point. I'm never going to convince them.