Summertime Bliss

I love teaching. I love giving teenagers new opportunities to learn something, I love helping them mold their writing skills, I love opening their eyes to new adventures in literature.

But today, my favorite part of teaching is the fact that I have the summer off. Or rather, that I chose to have the summer off.

What's frustrating is to hear non-educators say, "Well, it must be nice that teachers get their summers off." Hell yeah it's nice - but we earn our summers off. We spend 8 hours a day with 120-180 teenagers/kids (unless you're Andy - then you have 35 really tough kids), countless hours grading, creating lesson plans, attending professional developments, sitting in 10 milion different kinds of meetings involving the school or smaller learning community or department or grade level, we plan and grade during the holidays, even parts of the summer. My eyesight is getting worse each year due to the students' increasingly negligent handwriting and I've been threatened. Teaching isn't easy.

But it's so nice to relax during the summer. And so far, my summer's been pretty relaxing. Soon, however, I'll be at Rice University for a week and then 5-6 weeks in DC, so I will be extremely busy. But for now, I leisurely wake up (still around 6:30 - my body does not respond to late sleeping, and neither does my dog), work out for a couple of hours, hang by the pool for an hour or so, babysit my godchild, and then my evenings are completely free. I may be at Starbucks, I may be at the movies, I may be at the gym again, I may be sitting on my arse watching television. I have nothing to grade, nothing to plan. I am doing a smidgeon of work, however, in the form of reading a novel that I have to teach in the fall and answering the study guide questions. I will be doing a great deal of reading this summer, which I love, but I'll be reading school novels. I have to finish Jane Eye, and read Ella Minnow Pea and Do's and Taboos Around the World. I hope to have Jane Eyre finished before I go to DC (plus read those Shakespeare plays).

Hmm. I guess I'm not relaxing as much as I could. But I'm reading by the pool and workin' on my tan.

Cheers!

By the way, if anyone is actually following my posts... the result of my musings last week was very satisfactory. :)