What Should a Teacher Do During the Summer? Pt. 2

“Teachers are lucky. You get your summers off,” people say. They say this kind of thing more often during July and August than during, say, February. No matter the time of year, however, Mr. Stickfigure is happy to remind people that his borough is looking for good teachers.

As previously mentioned, I consider it a near-duty for teachers to take their summers off. Whether they do something productive during that time is up to them and their wallets, but those two months are important to the balance of nature in the educational ecology. However, as a citizen, I feel slighted by the suggestion—usually offered in the early afternoon of a sunny day—that I am somehow over-privileged because I’m not in class with somebody else’s children all year round. Come, now, folks, these kids aren’t that bad! Don’t you have some chores for them to do?

In some fairness, it’s not entirely the lack of America’s most well-educated babysitters that civilians are referring to when they comment so enviously on our extended summers. Most civilians, we must remember, are working a 9-to-5 job. The actual formula is 9-to-5 for fifty weeks a year. Ah, there’s the rub! The asymmetry of the teaching profession cannot help but appear as an earthly paradise to the work-a-day bound. Having somehow learned to stomach the idea that the human animal needs only 14 days of contiguous autonomy per year, the teacher’s schedule begins to look like the good fortune of an overindulged house-pet in the eyes of year-round work horses.

And yet it is only fair that civilians know what all teachers must come to learn: Two months off during the summer is not worth the job of teaching. Ten months is a long time, too, and it is far too long a time to suffer for the sake of a long vacation. In fact, teaching is not a job that should be suffered through at all. It is a virtual guarantee that a teacher who is “living for the weekend” is inviting a miserable week. Instinctually, civilians know that teaching is not a job for those who cannot learn to enjoy it. Despite the occasional jibe, they know that they would find it hard to enjoy the work we do. That is why, during February, teachers are much less likely to hear about how lucky we are to have our summers off.