Summer Holidays

There’s no shirking the issue, I have to deal with it sometime and that time is now. Controversial, arguably unfair or perhaps well-earned depending on the degree of your jealous animosity or guilty defensiveness, I refer now to the subject matter of a teacher’s 5 ½ week summer holiday.

Out of deference to all you normal folk who get less annual leave in a year than we teachers are gifted in July-August, I will try not to complain about it. I will merely paint a picture using a variety of colours. Like Benetton.

First of all, yes we do work in the summer, the conscientious more so. But without a time pressure work tends to expand to fill the space you shove it into. Like a tampon. Thirty minutes work can fill four hours, because you tend to build in a varied programme of regular breaks, one break every time you get bored. So, if you’re marking, that tends to be every 3 minutes.

And it’s amazing what you can find to do to punctuate your time with. A cup of coffee, ten minutes of Jeremy Kyle, a poo, twenty minutes on twitter, reordering your CD rack, another poo.

Now, for the sake of comedy rather than accuracy, we could divide teachers into a small number of groups based on likely summer holiday pastimes.

Group 1 – the under 30’s with no children and expendable income. Sub-group 1A, singles. Travel. Usually South-East Asia.
Sub-group 1B, those in couples. Travel. Anywhere hot for a week, some dutiful visits to respective family members and a festival.
Sub-group 1C, those engaged to be married. Stay at home and paint the walls.

Group 2 – the over 45’s with adult children and expendable income.
Sub-group 2A, Heads, Deputies and Assistant Headteachers. Four weeks in France, returning in time for results day.
Sub-group 2B, middle-managers. Two weeks in France.

Group 3 – the thirty-somethings with young children.
Five weeks of visiting the park (when its not raining), soft-play centres, swimming pools, cinemas etc… one excursion every day or two, and lots of time at home feeling like you need adult company, but knowing it would be morally reprehensible to pay for it. So, you go on Facebook instead.
Then one week in Devon in a cottage by the sea.

Group 4 – the forty-somethings, with children who are able to piss off out to play on their own.
Work, a cup of coffee, ten minutes of Jeremy Kyle, a poo, twenty minutes on twitter, reordering your CD rack, another poo.
Then one week in France.

Taking away the structure of a normal term-time week is like a fat person removing a corset. Your life gets flabby. You embrace procrastination like a religion, almost like a holy war on urgency. You know there are lots of useful jobs you could do round the house and lots of family members you could visit, but there’s never any need to do any of it today or this week. There are a lot of tomorrows and a lot of next weeks to put things off until.

If you have a partner who does a normal job, then you might experience the following:
A phone call at 10 o’clock in the morning to see how your day is going. You have of course not long got up and have absolutely nothing to say in reply;
Your partner wanting to go to bed at 11, and you agreeing out of politeness, not wanting to seem unsociable, and then reading for about two hours while they snore, because you simply haven’t expended enough energy to need any sleep that particular night;
A dutiful urge to do housework… thirty minutes before your partner gets home, so it looks like you weren’t sat on your arse all day;
A need to have a list of about four things to tell your partner you’ve done when he/she gets home, which sound like they quite conceivably could have filled your whole day (suggesting that you lead a purposeful existence) when really it only took a combined total of twenty minutes to do all of them.

Most of us do actually go into work in the summer, usually to create some rubbish by clearing out cupboards for the site team to lug down to the skip in between doing all the jobs they had planned to do. Any work on computers in work is forbidden, however, as the network team (aka The IT Crowd) also require 5 weeks to do three days work in doing whatever they do to the computers in that time. Stuff, I think it is. (They tell us, but who fucking understands what they say?)

And that’s the summer. A leviathan break from work in which you don’t finish your novel, don’t have anything interesting to say about what you’re doing (to your partner, on twitter or on facebook), don’t do enough work or jobs round the house and generally question the whole purpose of your existence as a human being.

I’m sure Satre was a teacher who wrote his books in August.

Right, I’m off for a poo. I may be some time.