Holiday!

Oh thank God for that!

Right now you are probably too exhausted to celebrate the achievement of making it through another term, but you should. Switch your laptop off. If you’re a particularly keen¹ member of staff, remove all work email from your phone: no notifications, no sneaky reading them. Have some time off. You have earned it.

It’s always a little deceptive this term. For starters, it’s way shorter than the Christmas term, sometimes a whole 4 weeks shorter, so it feels like it should be a breeze³. However, this is simply not true. The Spring term is a battering.

Think about it. Mocks have been done (and frequently more than one series of them), papers marked and analysed and you’ve been working hard at a) finishing the course and b) plugging students’ gaps. You’ve probably been doing at least one revision session per week too. For free⁴. All that marking, all that extra time with students, all that extra stuff we do, it’s exhausting!

So, enjoy your break, but take a moment to remember what you do it for: the students. Yeah, they’ll drive you mad, piss you off, and be ungrateful little shits, but it’s important to remember they’re not all like that and 90%⁵ of the kids you teach are wonderful. It is also important to remember that to you it’s just another day, but for them it’s the first day of the rest of their life.

Now the clocks have gone forward (or at least in the UK they have), you’re possibly seeing something you haven’t seen in a while: the sun. Hopefully there will be dry weather⁶ over the next couple of weeks and we can enjoy being outside! You’ve earned this holiday through sheer bloody hard work in an environment not many people can last in – especially not those on social media⁷ and in the press that slag teachers off all the time. You’ve earned that glass of wine, cup of tea, nice meal, watching TV in your pyjamas for three days straight. Go have fun.

Until next time⁸.

FOOTNOTES

1. Stupid or SLT. Not mutually exclusive. ↩︎
2. Imagine their faces when they realise there’s no way Jesus was white… ↩︎
3. You really should know by now that nothing in teaching is a breeze. ↩︎
4. Imagine if we got overtime for revision sessions. Years ago, I worked in a Tesco warehouse and we got minimum time and a half for any work outside of contracted hours. Why do teachers do it for free? ↩︎
5. Hopefully a minimum figure! ↩︎
6. The forecast where I live is absolutely shocking for tomorrow. I’m expecting a call from Noah. ↩︎
7. They can fuck right off. ↩︎
8. I’m also going to take a 2 week break. If you enjoy this blog, please consider creating an account so you can like it each week, and share it wide and far on social media (which you don’t need an account to do). It helps get more eyes on the blog, which makes the algorithm pick it up. ↩︎