Education Issues: What Do Educators Do During the Summer?

Office Space - back to school sales in july — Office Space – back to school sales in july

I know I’ve posted in the past that teachers aren’t on vacation during the summer break, we’re in recovery. Unless you’ve spent time in the trenches, you really don’t know. Some teachers are far better at self-care than others and actually get away and do the things that recharge and restore them.

On one Facebook teachers group I saw that “sleep” was the leading activity once the school year ends.

My first years teaching, it was such a huge cut in salary from my phone company job that I chose to make it feel like less of a hit by not spreading out my pay to year-round. That meant that I’d get bigger monthly checks but also I wouldn’t get any income from the end of June until the first paycheck at the end of September. Just to deal with the anxiety of not getting a paycheck I’d work a couple weeks of summer school. But it wasn’t enough and I eventual ended up building a huge credit card debt. Every summer I’d get a huge influx of time, but no money to do anything with my time. I was such a working-class drone that I couldn’t break free from being inhibited of taking real time off in an effort to not spend any money (well, spend money on vacations or in some “big way”….).

The routine of spending a couple weeks doing summer school expanded significantly the summer after I switch from my classroom teacher position to running the technology side of our video-journalism magnet program. And l’m pretty sure that I wasn’t compensated for my time. That’s on me and my unwillingness to advocate for myself. I knew that coming in a couple days before the students wasn’t going to cut it, but I didn’t know how to speak up for myself given the amount of work I was doing. It was the beginning of a bad habit that I don’t think I ever got over in my 28 years as a teacher. I switched positions and schools enough and the nature of teaching technology, that I always needed much more than one week to set things up for the coming year. Ugh. That was not a healthy routine.

There have only been two or three times that I can think about in my teaching career where I really took time off. The first time I went to Arizona to hang out with a childhood friend for a week with the intention of writing every day while he worked and then we could party every night. I ended up getting in trouble with his family because, they were in the process of moving and I, apparently, was helping enough. That wasn’t so fun and I never repeated that mistake.

The next time I took time off, I was teaching at Full Sail University in Florida and went on a road trip with my girl up to Virginia, mainly to visit many, many wineries. Unfortunately I was also beginning to experience muscular weakness due to my autoimmune illness, which hadn’t been diagnosed yet. My body probably was offering a commentary on my nonstop lifestyle and forced me to stop and spend the next year in recovery and rethinking… a lot of things, especially my tendency towards not taking time off and my prior notion that I would never retire and just teach until I couldn’t do anything anymore.

Then in 2016 I found myself moving to Las Vegas, where all of the teachers have no choice but to be paid year-round. It then dawned on me that there was no reason for me to stay sweltering in my apartment for my first summer. I was going to get my direct-deposit check whether I was in-town or not. So, that first summer, I decided that I’d hit the road and go to a conference in San Antonio and then, having just driven across country the summer before when I moved from Florida, I thought it’d be fun to spend my 59th birthday with my friends in Florida.

While staying over a week with friends in Florida it didn’t make any sense to just drive straight back to Las Vegas. After making arrangements with a few friends and relatives and motels I hit the road again with stops in Wilmington (North Carolina), Washington, D.C., Brooklyn, Cleveland, Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, and Albuquerque. Those 39-days on the road were amazing and so much fun. But then I needed time to recover from being on the road so long and the beginning of next school year was moved up to the middle of August.

2017-06-23_D02_ALBQ-to-San-Antonio
2017-06-27 ISTE (San Antonio TX) with Paul Sparks
2017-06-27 ISTE (San Antonio TX) with Wendy Gorton
2017-06-29 New Orleans LA The Spotted Cat
2017-07-01 Eden Bar (Orlando FL) JBB 59th Birthday
2017-07-08 OHD at Outriggers Tiki Bar & Grill (New Smyrna Beach FL)
2017-07-14_D23_Smithsonian-Air-Space-Museum
2017-07-15_D24_Around-the-WWII-Monument
2017-07-17 NYC Subway with Brandon & Stephanie
2017-07-18_D27_One-World-Observatory
2017-07-20_D29_Cleveland_Rock-and-Roll-Hall-of-Fame
2017-07-22 Wrigley Building (Chicago IL) with Greg Thompson
2017-07-25 Modist Brewing Co (Minneapolis MN) with Laurel & Robert
2017-07-27 Coyote Ugly (Oklahoma City OK) with Arturo Saliva
2017-07-29 Meteor Crater AZ

When the next school year began I felt completely unprepared and spent the whole year playing catch-up and endlessly exhausted. The next two summers I greatly limited my travels to short trips to California, moved into a new place the first summer and spent money the second summer replacing the A/C. Then COVID hit and traveling anywhere was taken off the table. I also switched schools, moving up to middle school, so once we were allowed on campus I spent the summers of 2021 and 2022 setting up my robotics classroom. Prepping for the 2021-2022 school year, I spent seven weeks working on organizing all of the robotics hardware that had previously been stored all over campus. The following summer, for the 2022-2023 school year, I brought it down to around four weeks and couldn’t be bothered to write about it in my blog. I think I got paid for some of that time, but not the whole time. Also, even if I wasn’t on campus I was trying to wrap my head around how I could make it work better than the prior year. For those with a sadistic desire to read my musings, particularly during the 2021 7-week summer effort, I’ve posted links to those posts in the Sources section below.

Having worked my way summarizing these past six summers and the summers before that, I need a break just from the retelling. I know that I never quite got the hang of it and it’s a good thing to make my exit from this profession while I’m still mostly human. Going from 10-months of ridiculous pressure delivering curriculum and trying to guide disgruntled proto-humans and then trying to recover and reset over a two-month break can easily create a whiplash effect that I’m surprised I’ve survived for 28-years. In the words of Officer Murtaugh, “I’m getting too old for this shit.”