I'm so sorry everyone, I totally forgot that teachers can't complain about their job because they get the school holidays off...
I had a browse through Twitter this morning and I saw someone tweet about how teachers are already exhausted and it's only October, and I was an idiot and I read the comments on the thread. Pages and pages of comments that make me want to scream. Comments about how we earn plenty of money even though we say we don't, about how we should just quit if we don't like it (which I have addressed in a previous post), and comments about how we really can't complain because we get all of the school holidays off. This last one really boils my blood.
"Are they joking? They've only just gone back! Must be tough having to do some work after all those holidays..."
I am having anxiety attacks on Sunday evenings, I am fighting back tears when my alarm goes off in the mornings, I am locking myself in my office and putting my head on my desk to take some deep breaths away from it all during the day, I'm putting up with being spoken to like trash, hour upon hour by teenagers who I am breaking my neck to try and help, I am going to pieces when I am put on cover during my only free, knowing I'm on duty during my lunch break, I am making myself ill with all the late nights I am working for school show rehearsals and GCSE exam performances and open evenings and parents evenings, UNPAID, by the way, but it's alright everyone, we get school holidays!
Frankly, the only thing that got me through the last week was the thought of half term approaching. Not to mention, I work from 8:00 until 18:00, yet I'm only paid from 9:00 until 15:25. I'll come back to money in a minute, but I think that's an important reminder. Other professions get paid for all their overtime in money, we get our overtime given back to us in weeks at home with our loved ones. That is lovely, it really is, but it doesn't magically make up for everything else. I firmly believe that without the school holidays, no one would do the job. It would be laughable to expect anyone to do everything we do without that one positive thing. And you know what? Even with all that time we get back, it's still not worth it. I would give up all those school holidays to have a normal job with the average 28 days in a heartbeat. In fact, I will be doing that just as soon as I find another job.
Affording A Holiday
I also want to point out that while the school holidays are great, they're not the big fairytale that people think they are. It cost my boyfriend and I £4,000 to go to Corfu for 9 days in August. My other friends spent 3 weeks in Mauritius for that money. I can say goodbye to the idea that I might ever get to go to any of the places on my bucket list if it's costing four grand just to go to Greece. Don't get me wrong, I had a lovely time, and I know that a holiday is a luxury that some people don't get to experience at all. It's only because my boyfriend earns twice my salary that we were able to go - I barely contributed a third of it, and it's still sat on my credit card. However, my point here isn't: Oh my god I can't believe I only got to go to Corfu and not somewhere fancier. My point is, although having the time off is lovely, we absolutely have to pay for it.
At Least We Get Paid For... Oh Wait...
This feels like a good time to come back to the topic of money. A teaching salary is livable - it's not terrible. I earn about £36,000 a year (including the £1000 I get for being an assistant head of year). It's fine. The issue is the graft I have to do to earn that money. If I was working this hard in a different career, I'd be on a hell of a lot more. So why don't our earnings match the hard work and the consequential poor mental health? Well partly, because of the holidays. We get money coming in every month, because they spread our salary across 12 months, but the money we make is based on what they call our "directed time". Directed time is only 10 months. So, if you think taking 2 months per year unpaid sounds good to you, and you like the idea of only being allowed to holiday during peak times where everything is 5X the price and, as a result, not being allowed to take any time off outside of these dates to go to weddings, funerals and the like, then become a teacher.
It's Not What You're Imagining
Last but not least, having the time off as a teacher is absolutely nothing like when you used to have that time off as a student. Your friends and family are usually all at work, so it can be pretty lonely. It's nice to start with, but after a few days it starts to get very boring unless you have a young family or lots of friends who don't have jobs. I personally really struggle with the lack of routine.
I want to finish by saying, I recognise that having the school holidays is a good thing. I'm not saying for one minute that it isn't a really great perk that you don't get from other jobs. All I want to stress, is that it's not quite what people outside of teaching imagine it to be. It's nice, but it's not the best thing since sliced bread, and it certainly doesn't make up for the stress caused by the job. It's not fair to say that teachers aren't allowed to complain about everything else, just because they get more time off than you. If you think I sound ungrateful, please, be my guest and study to be a teacher. There's a huge shortage of teachers for a reason.
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