The Holiday Dilhemma

It's the last Thursday of the holidays - and its 9:37am. I have stopped what I was doing as a sudden thought has come across my mind that I felt needed me to stop and reflect on. (I was sorting through one of the piles of disorganization doom that I created last term - think 25cm of miscellaneous white paper - I will return to it shortly.)

Holidays are interesting in the teaching world. Based on one of my last posts where I borrowed the words of another to suggest that 'there is never enough' - I find that I lump my holidays with expectations that I will complete an INSANE amount of catch-up work, in the futile hope that I will achieve that unattainable perfection that I have in fact done enough. So now that I find myself at this point in my holidays (i.e staring down the tunnel of a new term and feeling relatively unprepared) I wonder what would constitute a successful holiday. What would I have done over the last two weeks to achieve the very tricky balance of feeling rested and physically ready for another term, but also mentally organised and prepared for another ten weeks of classes, meetings, extra curricular rehearsals, marking, and smiling.

I firstly am going to give myself a bit of a break. As a first year teacher, doing programme planning for three senior classes, the notion of feeling fully planned and prepared is an enigma to me at the moment. I try really hard to get my head around the nature of assessment, what the student needs to demonstrate in order to be successful in this assessment, and how this would look in my classroom planning and delivery - but the truth of the matter is, that I think this is impossible to predict sometimes. So many times this year already, I have felt really prepared for a class - then despaired when each activity I had prepared felt unsuccessful or just didn't float in some way or another. The only way to feel in control of this is to have the experience of having done this before, reflected, done it again, and again and again - and then even still there is an element of uncertainty.

So back to where I started - what justifies successful holidays. I think mainly that I give myself a rest. A rest from the thinking, worrying, strategising, fretting and basically 'freaking out' about school. At this point on the tenth day of my holidays I feel that I have given myself that chance, and therefore I feel ready to start term three. Sure, I could have done more, but I needed the break. I head into future terms and subsequent sets of holidays knowing that there will always be a careful balance and that I should not beat myself up about tipping the scales sometimes.