As I write this, early on a wintry Saturday, it’s the first morning of the mid-year school holidays here in Aotearoa. I’ve been counting down the days for the last week — not because teaching is such an onerous job that the idea of having a student-free break is the one thing that makes life liveable — but because the holidays do provide a small opportunity to get things done without the constant interruptions that are an everyday part of school life.
By the last week of term, everyone is in survival mode. By the last day of term, the brains of students and teachers alike have turned to mush and in an atmosphere of barely suppressed chaos a successful lesson is one where nobody gets stabbed with scissors and the floor is cleared of paper aeroplanes before students stampede out the door when the bell goes.
All pretence of anyone learning anything disappears. On Friday, my lesson plans consisted of handing students a laptop each and telling them not to swap the letters on the keyboard around. By last period, four students turned up to my lesson out of a class of twenty-three. God only knows where the rest of them were — I was in no hurry to find out — and the lesson consisted of putting the chairs on the desks so the cleaner would have better access to the floor and comparing Justin Bieber’s early catalogue with his more recent material.
But even in the midst of such chaos, great things can happen. In the corner of the main whiteboard in my classroom, sometime in the distant past, some helpful boy has used a sharp object to inscribe the outline of a penis (I guess I can’t know for sure it was a boy, but in my experience, girls, while being perfectly happy to vandalise school furniture, don’t do it by drawing images of male genitalia). One of my delightful students took it upon himself to use the penis as the central feature of an idyllic landscape scene, turning it into a lighthouse on a rock, surrounded by a gentle ocean, fluffy clouds and a passing sailboat. I’m not quite sure why the light was shining in the middle of the day but I wasn’t complaining — it was a wonderful picture and I was loath to rub it off when it came time to clean the whiteboard.
Image by Виктория Бородинова from Pixabay
I have a depressingly extensive list of schoolwork to complete by the end of the school holidays. There’s also an extensive list of chores to do around the house — all the things that build up because there’s never enough time to do them in the weekends.
If I didn’t have children of my own the chances of getting all these things done would be reasonable. However, I have three young children, who due to the vagaries of our schooling system have their school holidays at the exact same time as mine! Which means they’ll spend the next two weeks stealing each other’s toys and then complaining to me to arbitrate their disputes. This dynamic is going to be further complicated by the arrival of their older half-brother, who’s coming from Australia to stay with us for the holidays. It’s going to be fun times I tell you, but I can’t help thinking that by the end of it I’m going to need a holiday from the holidays.
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