The students have gone home. The classrooms are darkened, decorations waiting to be packed up in the new year. The gradebooks are close and email inboxes signed out. Winter break is here along with the much awaited time of rest and relaxation – time for family, friends, and loved ones.
And yet, there is a teacher who doesn’t stop.
They’re thinking of their kids, anxious if they’re safe at home, well-fed, or being taken care of. They’re worrying if their students will have a good holiday season.
They’re providing for their own holiday season: budgeting, shopping, planning. Some even work a second job because this is definitely not a cheap time of year. And teachers don’t teach for the money; they teacher for the kids. Even if they’re professional degrees and experience say they deserve otherwise.
They’re prepping for the new year because they know that this time out of school will be the only uninterrupted prep time they have. No meetings to fill up planning periods. No lack of bathroom breaks or shortened lunches. No covering classes or extra students because the substitute didn’t show up.
They’re thinking of their lessons and curriculum, how to make it better, how to catch their students up. They’re jotting down ideas, sending emails, or researching a new idea because they have that next *thing* coming up and they want their students to be ready.
They’re planning the next school event, staff social, or extra-curricular activity because school is so much more than just in-school learning, yet they aren’t given the extra time to plan so much more. Just the same mandated 40-minutes (if they’re lucky).
As much as they need to be present for their own families, their own personal obligations, the teacher brain doesn’t turn off. It keeps going, despite them knowing that there are more important things they need to be worrying about. They aren’t getting paid extra for this mental load anyway.
Yet, they can’t stop. The teacher brain on break finally has room to breathe, relax, and decompress. Along with that extra space comes room for thinking, creating, and reevaluating.
So while many think teachers are lucky to get a holiday break, just think for a moment about how it’s not truly a break. The workload doesn’t just get put on hold until they go back to school. Even though they have left the school building, the mental and emotional load they carry never stops.
The teacher who is “on break” truly isn’t always “on break.”
The Musical Whiz 