Ah the life of a teacher! Two months off every summer which we spend sipping Long Island Iced Tea while lazing about in our hammocks. It’s like an 8 week weekend.
Well – not quite. It is like an 8 week weekend in some ways. I spend my days working around the house and looking after kids. I manage to slip in an afternoon nap on most days. Occasionally I get out to see a movie (so far I’ve seen WALL-E and Dark Knight) and every once in a while I get to sleep in.
It’s also like a weekend because every day feels like Saturday or Sunday. The first 4 weeks feel like Saturdays. Thoughts of teaching, marking or preparing for classes are banished from my consciousness. I make needed repairs, adjustments and improvements to my home. I spend many hours playing with my children. I procure the flesh of tasty animals to sear upon the barbeque. I am, in short, lord and master of my empire.
And then, August ambushes me. August is the proverbial month of Sundays as I have a constant nagging voice in my head, quiet at first but quickly getting louder, that I should be doing something related to teaching. I often spend a good amount of mental energy on Sundays during the school year planning and panicing about school related issues, and this process is replayed on a larger scale in August. On a Sunday during the school year, I begin by remembering all the tests and assignments that are wanting to be marked. This isn’t a concern in August so my mind replaces this with a query about what kind of activities and assessments I can give my students in the upcoming year that will motivate my students and empower them to reach their full potential. I will sometimes have one or two good ideas, but lacking any serious revelations about the nuts and bolts of what I want to do my mind moves on to stage 2 – year and unit plans. I begin to formulate plans that will weave all of these individual pieces (which I haven’t thought of yet, but we can always leave the details for later, right?) into some overarching experience or theme. I contemplate these things for awhile before moving on to stage 3 – panic. This usually kicks in about 3 days before classes begin. In this stage I realize that I’m going to need to have something for the students to do during that first week.
So far, things are right on schedule – I’m starting to think in terms of overall unit and year plans. But I’ve cleverly planned to avoid the panic stage by going on vacation until the last possible minute. We are leaving on Sunday for a few days in Edmonton and Calgary. After one day back to wash laundry and re-stock our food supplies, we are off to Waskesiu for five days. That leaves two days before I head back to work, then another four days before classes start. Six days should be enough to plan the first semester, right?