The End Is Near

The best Tweet I sent yesterday contained one of my favorite motivational quotes, penned by one of my favorite philosophizers.  Take a gander:

The best e-mail I sent yesterday contained a reply to the following query:  “What was the reason you became a teacher?”  The sender, a high school freshman (Hi Isaac!), has plans to become President someday and is already constructing his education platform.  Wanting to be on good terms with the future Prez I replied with three reasons:  1) June,  2) July,  3) August.  I did go on to give a legitimate answer that I can’t, for the life of me, remember, but how can I not be excited about some extended time away from an active alarm clock?

We teachers will try to bluff our way past the fact we get a huge vacation – we tell you about summer professional development, summer curriculum writing, wrapping up the past year until well into June and prepping for the next year in August – but I’m telling you right here, right now:  we get three glorious months off!  Truth be told, if I could change anything about school structure I would create year-round school with multiple short breaks rather than the antiquated summer break we have now.  But until I can make that change I’m gonna enjoy the living daylights out of summer vacation!!

I’m troubled, though, by the way we approach the approaching time off.  I do mean “we”; I’m as guilty as the next teacher of the trends that trouble me.  For instance, much testing is done in late April and early May.  We drive ourselves to fully prepare our students for these benchmark assessments and when the tests are over…..we let out a big sigh and coast through the final weeks of the school year.  I have watched classrooms shut down in early May, which gives those students four months away from quality teaching.  It’s a bit hypocritical for us to complain about the emphasis on testing while treating “the test” as more important than the final month of instruction.  This practice of gearing up for the spring assessments only to spend the following weeks winding down gives students the clear message that “the test” is the most important reason to be in school, despite teachers’ cries to the contrary.

Someone somewhere must have decided to put an alphabet countdown activity on Pinterest, ‘cause now everyone everywhere has decided to use the final 26 days of school to constantly remind students that school is nearly over.  Never mind the atrophy of our collective creativity this constant copycatting is accelerating,

(C’mon people, think for yourselves just a little.  With barely an effort I’ve got most of my own alphabet countdown ready for next year.  I’m already looking forward to ‘E is for Enema’ day, and I’d better start gathering supplies for ‘Making Moonshine with Mom’ on M day.)

why on Earth do we glorify the impending end of learning…..FOR 26 DAYS?!!?  These countdowns clearly communicate that school is something to be endured, a sentence that will be lifted once we get to the letter Z.  Teachers’ visible excitement about the impending end also conveys a message, one that says, “Hey kids, we spend most of the year acting like school is important….but really we just want it to be over, too.”  To make matters worse we gather after school each day and shake our heads at the lack of focus the kids have, or comment about how “they’ve already shut down”, or we simply throw our hands in the air and declare it useless to try teaching anything because “the kids know summer is coming so they’ve stopped trying to learn.”  We come dangerously close to giving the inmates the keys to the asylum.

Might we, and our students, be better served by approaching the end of a school year with the mindset of my Tweet from yesterday?  No, no, no – I’m not implying we spend the last month dressed in black and wander around muttering lamentations of mourning…although I wouldn’t mind trying that…and I usually dress in black most days as it is, so…  No, I’m suggesting we shift our thoughts and actions about the end from excitement to urgency.  Make the most out of each day with structure and routine and lessons and application.  Replace “countdowns to the end” with “this is how many chances we have left for learning together!”  Treat testing day as just another opportunity to show what you know and then come back the next day and teach the heck out of whatever needs taught.  Whether it’s living our life or teaching our students, we get a limited number of days to do both – we should make them full, make them productive.

Teaching is a tough, tough job and we earn every relaxing day of every vacation we get.  But teachers, we need to be careful not to start those vacations too soon.  Now, I need to get back to my alphabet countdown…..let’s see, Vasectomy day, Wart-removal day, X-Files day, Yizkor day………