March 21, 2007
Spring Break – A Time Off?
Here I sit, the middle of the week during my spring break, and I’m trying to figure out when I can get to school to post mid-term grades, try to grade a few papers, and get some much-needed organizing done. And still here I sit.
I need a break, a real break. I feel a bit bad about that. Most people don’t get a full week off in the middle of the spring. Then again, most people don’t get a full summer off either.
And yet, I need this break. I put in, as most teachers do, about 60 hours of work a week. Some days I’m at the office (because I refuse to bring work home and so taint my home life with student grades) for fourteen hours a day. I constantly check email, even at home, and I spend many a waking hour, when I’m not even at school, planning out writing assignments, considering how I will structure a new course. I’m tired and need a break. Yet, I can’t fully take one. So even now, in the midst of spring break, I long for summer.
However, I know that come summer I will have two courses to teach, filing to complete, three new courses to write syllabi for. Even that time, won’t be a break. Alas . . .
All that whining aside, I’m a blessed girl. I get to do my work when I want it, less class time when it’s important that I actually show up at a given hour in a given place; I get to push myself to exhaustion on some days and sometimes (rarely but sometimes) take a weekday off; I get a few weeks of change, not necessarily vacation, at the holidays and in the spring, and I get summers of less every day work. I’m very fortunate.
But that said, I’m taking the rest of the day off from work – so that I can clean my house. Does it never end?
Filed by Andi at 7:29 am under Teaching Triumphs and Travails
1 Comment
so, how are your summer classes going? are you experimenting? giving yourself the freedome to try new things, to engage your students in new ways, to engage new parts of you? Remember that entry you did on My Space–breaking out of the limits. Go for it. Habits are hard to break–don’t I know that well!