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Health & Fitness

Secrets Revealed: What Teachers Do in the Summer

At the risk of becoming an outcast among his peers, one bold teacher pulls aside the curtain.

Of course you’re wondering what we teachers do in the summer. That’s why you read this blog.

To be perfectly honest, it’s not all champagne wishes and caviar dreams for the seven or eight weeks of summertime frolicking we’re given, but those of us who have young children are certainly blessed with more family time than a lot of other occupations allow.

The first weekend after School’s Out is a big relief, not because there’s no work on Monday, but because the last few weeks of school are a real emotional slog. I teach a lot of seniors, and every year, I handle the whole leaving business poorly. There is sometimes a depth to teacher-student relationships, especially after you’ve shared three or four classes together, that makes the saying of goodbye a little more emotionally weighted than a nod of the head or a wave of the hand. 

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My secret for avoiding an emotional goodbye is to use students’ number one study strategy: procrastinate. Remember the episode of Seinfeld when George was dumped, but he kept letting his answering machine pick up the dumper's phone call? That’s where I get my goodbye from. I just keep saying “See you tomorrow” up until graduation. If you’ve ever been to one, you see that the last thing the graduates do is walk a gauntlet of teachers; the dispersion of all the emotional energy makes each individual’s burden easy to bear.

Once I’ve exhaled, I inhale.Then I panic: Summer’s almost over, and I haven’t gotten a darn thing done. For some teachers, this “darn thing” is a big household project neglected between mid-August and the end of June. For others, it’s more teaching or working camps. For still others, it’s coursework. For me, it’s reading and writing. (Another secret revealed: most English teachers don’t read books between September and June, except for vacations; there’s always the nagging guilt of, I really should be reading all those papers instead.)

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Right now, I am on my bi-annual Big Russian Novel project. This year’s book is War and Peace. Big Russian Novels give me a sense of empathy for what students go through when they read. You have to keep track of so many names, and Russian novelists are fond of doing things like naming both the protagonist and antagonist Nikolai. The inclusion of the patrynomic with every first name forces any reader to come up with a strategy for keeping the characters straight.

I’m also working on improving my understanding of Whitman. With all the things there are to read in this world, I’ve never given enough time to Whitman, and I’ve discovered through my poetry classes the last few years that he comes alive when his words are spoken. I sit by the pool and find myself moving my lips as I’m reading Leaves of Grass on my Kindle.

Whitman is also feeding my craving for writing poetry, which I haven’t done enough of the last couple of years. It’s very hard to write poetry when there is no Muse involved, whether that muse comes in the form of a workshop, a class or some other participatory activity that gives and allows you to give energy to poetry. So I’ve started to try to write a “Song of Westwood” (the name of our pool) as a way of not only amusing myself but also helping myself better understand what I’m reading.

You kids thought this whole writing to learn business was just for students? Ha!  It’s for people, silly.

Anyway, later this summer, I’ll share a few lines.

The greatest benefit to having the summer off is the opportunity to experience what students go through in their reading and writing.  The need to develop strategies to solve my own problems – focusing on interesting v. “important” aspects of a text; figuring out how not to get confused between Nikolai Ilyich and Nikolai Andreevich; thinking that your writing sucks too much for anyone to read it; knowing how much time it actually takes to get the work done – helps me understand the kinds of things I have to do to be a better teacher this year than I was last year.

Enjoy the Family Fourth.  Let’s hope all those teenagers I know and love so well keep their names out of the police blotter.

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