Today is the first day of (official) Summer Vacation. The end of the school year is always bittersweet. It's summertime (yahoo!), but you do actually miss teaching and the kids. The reason you enter the teaching profession is for everything that has happened over the last 10 months, not what's going to happen in the next 2. Don't get me wrong, I love the beach. I love traveling, and I intend on doing both. I also for the first time in a couple of years have a job over the summer.
What will I be doing you ask?
You guessed it...teaching.
The last two summers I did not work, and it kind of dragged on me (for a multitude of reasons). Summer is great for taking some time to relax and recharge the batteries, but I guess they say you can't have too much of a good thing. Not working eventually drags on you the same way the monotony of repetitive busy work behind a desk can, and in the case of teachers, you are eager to get back into the classroom to wow another class of kids.
Teachers want to teach. Anybody who says that teachers enter the profession for 3 reasons (June, July, and August) simply don't get it. They don't get the time commitment. They don't understand the effort. They don't understand the passion of what it takes to become a teacher. We love summer as much as the next guy, and yeah, I'm not going to say that it ISN'T a nice little perk to have 9 weeks free and clear of any formal responsibility, but I can assure you that that is NOT why we took the job.
What matters more to us than anything else is the next generation and getting them ready for being in the positions of authority that we currently hold. In many cases, we are preparing them for jobs that don't even exist yet (talk about a challenge). We want the world to be a better place for them than it is for us. I know it sounds cliché, but it is the truth.
Happy summer, everybody. I want crabs.
...the kind you eat, get your minds out of the gutter!
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