Summer Teaching Loss: the Value of Those Precious Vacations
As educators, we cherish our time off—all those religious holidays, winter and spring breaks, and, of course, summer vacation. Teachers choose to spend the time in a variety of ways from visiting friends and family to traveling to far-off lands; from enrolling in courses they’ve always wanted to take to just relaxing on the backyard hammock catching up on long-neglected reading.
Whatever the activity, most educators view the time as a chance to recharge their batteries for the next phase of the school year, which, at times, feels like a mad sprint without any water breaks. For many, vacation is the only chance to catch one’s breath. Needless to say, the last thing we feel like doing during our time off is teaching.
However, I would ask my colleagues to reconsider and think for a moment about the possible benefits gained whenever we teach, especially during those stretches when teaching might feel like the last thing we want to do.
Teaching is, indeed, a craft, and so, as with any craft-oriented activity, it is infinitely perfectible, begging our constant connection for us to become in any way proficient. Not unlike sports, art, or music (or, for that matter, anything in life prone to external nurturing and development), our teaching improves the more we do it. In other words, the more we practice, the better we get.
Which is exactly what happened to me this past summer. This past summer—and against what I thought at the time was surely my better judgment—I decided to take a risk and do some teaching. A few of my fellow educators and I started the Print Academy, an arts mentorship program for local urban-area youth. What I thought was a decision that would surely lead to my burning out come September, actually resulted in the opposite. The experience galvanized me! And in ways I could hardly predict.
When the school year finally rolled around, I actually felt sharper, more confident somehow and ready to go. Such is the benefit of remaining connected to the craft in a way that is persistent, consistent, and insistent—our competency expands, both in how we feel about ourselves as educators and in the actual skills we possess for the classroom.
We often talk about summer learning loss and the detrimental effects that three months of relative inactivity can have on students. However, less understood and greatly underestimated must be the similarly detrimental effects which summer teaching loss can have on teachers.
