Teaching always reminds me of swimming. You sprint up and down the lengths of the pool, barely pausing for breath at each end. Once you have do your set of exercises, you stop and pause.
As a full time teacher, I perceive each term as being like a set of exercises, the weekends being the gulp of air taken at the end of each length before you plough on with another stretch. Eventually you get to the holiday, and you need it.
So I’m now a couple of days into the holiday. The stress is beginning to bleed off, I’m beginning to relax. It helps that I’ve left the books I’ve brought home to mark in the car. There are over 100 of them, each requiring upwards of 5 minutes attention. I’ll need to put aside a long day to deal with them before returning to work.
While I enjoy teaching, the paperwork and marking is excessive. While I love being busy, the workload does take it’s toll. The holidays are lovely, but they don’t compensate for the stresses of term time and the total focus on the job. Having worked in the commercial world, I had much more of a life with 20 days annual holiday.
So why do I stay in education? I may write a post about that sometime.