Teachers, Stop Saying You Have Summers Off

There is a very dangerous idea in this country that teachers are only ‘working’ when they are directly engaging with students. The idea is so deeply pervasive that many teachers have come to believe it themselves.

Over the summer, I will present at a number of conferences to rooms full of teachers who will freely describe themselves as being ‘on vacation’. Only a teacher would describe attending a professional conference as part of their vacation. 

During the school year, it’s perfectly common for a teacher to spend an hour in the following way: grade some papers, talk with a colleague about a student intervention, call a couple parents, check-in with an administrator about any range of questions, heat up something to eat while putting together notes for future lesson plans, and then rush to arrange their room and materials for an incoming class. Later, when they talk about their day, they’ll say they did all of this on their ‘off period’!

It’s true that teachers celebrate the end of the school year just as much as students do, and yes, many teachers take vacations over the summer. But the summer is also when teachers finally have time to step back, reflect, assess the previous year, and plan for the year to come. A teacher who teaches two separate courses will give 360 unique presentations in a school year and plan a series of accompanying activities to go with each one. In no other profession would people be considered ‘off-the-clock’ when preparing for that level of work. 

Over the summer, teachers may feel like they are ‘on break’ because their day-to-day is so much less stressful than the daily deluge of juggling lesson plans, grading, and navigating scores of individual relationships with children. But teachers should recognize that the sense of peace and relative calm they experience while working over the summer doesn’t have to be called ‘vacation’. It’s actually a fairly normal state of being for most adult professionals. During most of summer ‘break’, teachers look far more like business managers who can work from home than someone who is on a proper vacation.  

So teachers, I implore you, stop enabling those who want you to believe that you’re only working when you’re in front of students. The next time someone asks you about your plans for the summer just say, “I’m looking forward to being able to work from home.”