What Should a Teacher Do During the Summer? Part 1

However I respond to this question today, I will be sure to have violated my answer by September. Nevertheless, it seems apropos to ask ourselves at this time of year: What should teachers be doing now? Mr. Stickfigure, for one, does not think we should be teaching summer school. This is not to say that we should be doing what Mr. Stickfigure does during the summer, which is almost nothing except for going on killer vacations with the beautiful Mrs. Stickfigure. For my part, I only went to school during the summer once in my life, and that was to finish the last class for my master’s. Thus, I can say with certainty that my summers were better spent during the previous 18 years of my education. Now, teaching summer school is not the same as going to summer school, I’m sure. Still, I am a better student than I am a teacher. During the school year I am driven, as a teacher, to offer my pupils a learning experience that, as a student, I could appreciate myself. It’s a round-about way of doing the job, I know, but my instincts as a student are more dependable than my instincts as a teacher. And what my spidey-senses have always told me is that someone who never wanted to go to summer school should not sign up to teach it.

That’s just Mr. Stickfigure, however, and we already know he’s a bit off. Why can’t the normals teach summer school? Or at least the teachers who are better teachers than they were students, can’t they teach summer school? Sure, and more power to them. In fact, they will need it. Mr. Stickfigure crawls to the end of June like a runner with an Iron Lung at the Iron Man finish line. The thought of manning-up for another round in July is tiring to think, let alone to undertake. Fortunately, schools are staffed by more resilient folks than Mr. Stickfigure. Still, teaching during the summer takes endurance, and endurance takes pacing. Let’s just say that Mr. Stickfigure routinely forgets to save energy for that last quarter lap.

But even those teachers with greater endurance than Mr. Stickfigure should not be teaching summer school, because summer school is un-American. Let us not forget that summer is the only season when school is traditionally not in session. Both teachers and students who go to summer school should be the first to realize that this is not summer school, this is de facto year-round schooling. After all, fall, winter and spring are already accounted for: add summer school and do the math. It should not have to be stated, but year-round schooling is a well-known totalitarian mechanism which all honest, God-fearing, law-abiding Americans resist by nature.

We mustn’t forget that without summer vacation, there would be no summer as we know it in America. Summer in America is much more than a meteorological fact, it is a way of life—in all of the laden senses of that phrase. Summer is what forces us to create an alternate yearly calendar which stands in contradiction to the very laws of celestial motion. At any time, we must be able to translate between the years 2006, 2005-2006, and 2006-2007—any or each of which can describe the same or different times. We maintain this divided cosmos because it buys us time. Summer is what gives us time to grow two inches, get our braces removed, kiss somebody in another state. Summer is what forces us to find something to do with our own kids for two months. Summer is what gives us graduation and back to school and the beach and anticipation and beautiful cyclical asymmetry. And the space between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next is what gives us time for all of this. This is the space filled, like the snap of a cuff, by summer school.