Do you talk to yourself? It’s a rhetorical question, because I know that you do; we all do. The internal dialogue is an incessant chatter, and around the middle of August the conversation reaches fever pitch.
Here’s why: the 16th of August is somewhere to the right of slap-bang in the middle of the summer holidays. The part of you that’s never satisfied, however, has done the maths. It’s counting down the days to the start of the new academic year. This part of you annoyingly dares to suggest that the summer break is almost over, which is completely irrational. Despite having considerably more time remaining than the whole of a Christmas holiday, ‘that’ sand-timer part of you is whispering away and undermining today’s enjoyment.
So, the conversation morphs into personal bargaining. In an effort to appease the sand-timer, we offer to nip in to school and sort out the ‘groupings’. Or perhaps we’ll spend a morning (that inevitably bleeds into a whole day) sorting out the library area, in the hope that we’ll enjoy a family trip to the cinema in return.
Effectively, we’re rolling the dice in our own personal board game, resigning ourselves to a few sessions inside, hoping to earn a ‘get out of jail free’ pass.
But let me make this clear. You are not guilty. You are on h o l i d a y. You don’t have to be ‘inside’ and indeed, should do your very best to avoid it. You don’t need to ‘earn’ a free pass because you’ve already banked a shed load of them last year.
Please note: I’m not frivolously suggesting that you shouldn’t be ready for the beginning of the new school term. I am suggesting that ‘ready’ looks quite different to what many teachers may perceive in the middle of August.
‘Ready’ doesn’t mean your classroom has to be so practically perfect in every way.
It means you have to be rested, reinvigorated and raring to go. You have to be ready.
Other professions don’t have a monopoly on holiday enjoyment. You matter way more than a wall display.
In fact, you matter.
Just saying.