A couple of weeks before the autumn half-term in my newly-qualified teacher year, I put a status on Facebook: “14 more sleeps #thankgoodness”. The speed with which my teacher friends liked and commented on it made me laugh, but one comment brought me up short. A friend remarked that five weeks into the job was a bit soon to be feeling like this, and asked whether I was sure I was in the right career. This lack of understanding seems to be typical of people’s feelings about teachers’ holidays.
Don’t get me wrong, I realise that lots of jobs involve 12 hour days, tough clients and lots of pressure, so I’m not claiming we do the world’s hardest job. But when I say “hooray, only two weeks until half-term,” it’s not so much celebration as it is relief. It means I only have another two weeks to survive, living life at 200mph, before I can pause and regroup. Only another two weeks of trying not to do or say the wrong thing during lessons and meetings, before I get a chance to sleep for more than five hours and regain some sanity.
Ask any partner or child of a teacher how many of us actually spend our holiday sitting on the sofa watching TV or lazing in bed doing nothing and the answer may be surprising. Take half-terms, for example, you have five days off. Two days in bed finally giving into and recovering from the various illnesses that it’s been easier to battle through than take time off for during the term. Two days of not really feeling well enough to do anything but needing to mark a class set (or three) of controlled assessments. One day to squeeze in six weeks’ worth of neglected friends and family.
This week for me has been the usual half-term whirl of dentist, hairdresser, hygienist, car service and a cracking migraine. My best friend is moving away on Monday and I have yet to touch my marking because, after four years of all-consuming work, I was determined to spend a decent amount of time with her. I am seeing my husband and my parents for lunch tomorrow and cannot help but feel that slight panic about when I will do my work, simply because I have spent five days doing normal things that people do on annual leave.
I am not for one second suggesting that everyone should get behind the hashtag #HeroTeachers, which is frankly slightly awkward. But it would be nice, once in a while, if people didn’t tear us down for having some time where we don’t have to work (even though we do).
If you took the extra time worked by teachers before and after school, and on weekends, and compared this to our holidays, it would probably work out as a pretty standard amount of annual leave. Compare it to other jobs: my husband’s work allows him to take a day off every fortnight as long as he puts in an extra day’s worth of hours across the nine days he works. But nobody criticises that. Nobody tells him he doesn’t deserve it, because he has demonstrably put the work in. So why do people feel it is OK to claim that teachers’ do not deserve their holidays?
This is probably a battle that teachers will never win, but perhaps we aren’t looking to win. Perhaps it would just be nice if, as we collapse in a germ-ridden heap next to our pile of marking, we were left in peace instead.
Just remember, whether a teacher has dodged the germs and has a relatively relaxing half-term or whether they have been in bed all week, the Sunday evening blues will be back with a vengeance tomorrow night no matter how much they love their jobs. This means an evening of worry, panic and insomnia as your mind runs over all the things that you didn’t have time to do last term and were going to do over half-term but still haven’t had time to do. Making the to-do lists in your head marked: “urgent/ important/ necessary/ other”.
No matter how long we’ve had off – whether it’s a weekend, a week or six weeks – as soon as we set foot back in the school, life resumes at 200mph until we’re close enough to count down to the next one.
