Why Teachers Need a Summer Break

Summary

Teachers need a summer break to recover from the stress and demands of the school year, which have been exacerbated by the challenges of teaching during a pandemic, and to prevent burnout amidst a growing teacher shortage.

Abstract

The article emphasizes the importance of summer break for teachers, particularly after a challenging year of pandemic teaching. The author, a recently retired teacher, reflects on the stress of constant changes in curriculum and training requirements, and the unrealistic expectations placed on educators, including the impact of student test scores on teacher evaluations. The piece argues that the premature appearance of school supplies in stores is a reminder of the limited time teachers have to decompress and recharge, which is crucial given the alarming rates of teacher burnout and the declining number of individuals entering the teaching profession. The author advocates for allowing teachers time to enjoy their summer, engage in personal activities, and remember their passion for education without the immediate pressure to prepare for the next school year.

Opinions

The author believes that the early stocking of school supplies in stores is an unwelcome reminder of the finite nature of summer break for teachers.
There is a strong sentiment that teachers are being overburdened with excessive professional development requirements and training sessions during the summer, which hinders their ability to rest and recharge.
The author suggests that the education system is flawed, with teachers being unfairly held accountable for systemic issues such as student performance gaps.
The article conveys that the teacher shortage is a critical issue, influenced by factors beyond just salary, such as the high demands and constant changes in educational expectations.
The author expresses that teachers deserve time to engage in personal leisure activities and to reflect on their motivations for choosing the teaching profession.

Especially this year.

I was in a big box department store yesterday for the purpose of finding a couple of cushions for some outdoor furniture. I headed straight to the section of the store where one might find such a thing and found nothing but bare shelves. The entire area was stripped clean of patio furnishings, citronella oils, pool floaties, and garden décor.

Gone. All gone.

As I stared blankly at the empty shelves, an employee with an armload of backpacks walks by, sets them down, and begins stocking the shelves with school supplies.

Wait, what?

We have not even enjoyed the summer solstice yet, and now you’re putting out colored pencils, backpacks, and dry erase markers?

Can we just slow down, please?

Let me enjoy the summer!

Now, the good news here, for me anyway, is that I do not have to buy school supplies anymore: I am now a retired teacher as of three weeks ago. It used to fill me with dread to see the school supplies coming out in the stores because it was a reminder that my summer had an expiration date.

This is something you know on a cerebral level, of course, but most teachers I know need at least a couple of weeks to decompress from the school year before you can truly begin to enjoy your summer break. Planning a trip is a careful process; a two-week vacation somewhere takes a big chunk of time out of this limited resource called summer. I would always front load those long trips earlier in the summer so I could just languish away the rest of the break, pretending it was endless.

Now, it really is endless! Summer forever! And the relief is powerful.

Literally the day after school was out in May my school district started sending out emails about summer professional development that had to be done; summer in-service sessions to attend both online and in person. Mandatory training that had to be done — hours of it. “Here’s the link to sign up” for your grade book training, sexual harassment training, blood-borne pathogen training, crisis intervention training, suicide awareness training, Covid protocol training, attendance management training, ethics training, on and on and on. You do not have time to catch your breath from the last school year before prepping for the next one.

This last year was incredibly difficult for educators of all ranks all across the country. Teaching in a pandemic is not something we were ever trained to do. Sanitizing computers and desks, monitoring facemasks, taking temperatures, and teaching both online and in person simultaneously, none of that was covered in my education courses. That is a completely different post for another day but trust me when I tell you it was stressful and exhausting on every single level and school district administrators would do well to let their teachers rest up a bit before throwing the euphemistically named “professional development opportunities” at them.

Summer break is always an important time for teachers to regroup and recharge. Teachers suffer burnout at an alarming rate, especially when supervisors keep changing things: new curriculum, new gradebook programs, new mentoring programs, we need to try this, try that, and reinvent the wheel every five years. The teacher shortage across the United States is at a critical level, especially after this Covid year.

More and more universities are reporting a decline in teacher candidates, and the salary is only part of the problem. Teachers are being asked to do more and more and it’s never enough. Districts have been forced to reevaluate teacher effectiveness by rating teachers based, in part, on student test scores, forgetting that teachers are not miracle workers. When a tenth-grade teacher gets a student in August that reads on a third-grade reading level, how do we get that kid caught up in just a few months? Yet we measure those teachers exactly the same as we measure those who teach Honors students who all arrive reading above grade level.

My example is only slightly a generalization, but suffice to say that there are a lot of things in our education system that are broken, and we keep making it the teacher’s fault.

So, slow down with the restocking of school supplies, would ya? Our teachers deserve this time to shop for citronella candles, stay up late, watch a meteor shower, blow up a pink flamingo pool float and recover some sense of why we went into education in the first place.