Gateway to Summer

The first rule of daily prompts is don’t talk about daily prompts being repeated all…the…time! The last time this came up I believe I talked about New Year’s being my favorite holiday. I could talk about Christmas this time, because it really is a great holiday, but I think a lot of people have that as a favorite. So, in honor of the fact that summer is almost here, I am going to go with Memorial Day this time. I hesitate to even consider it a holiday because the meaning behind the day is to honor the military soldiers who have given their lives in service to their country. It’s really more of somber holiday, but at the same time, it is still the unofficial start to summer. And that’s why for as long as I was a teacher, it was the best three-day weekend of the year.

At my school, before I became the principal for that one harrowing year, my old boss had designated the last day of school as whatever the Friday was before Memorial Day weekend. She hated the idea of having to come back to school after that long weekend. That’s one of the few things I agreed with her about. We always had scheduled teacher workdays the week after, but some years, she would tell us that as long as everything on our end-of-year checklist was finished, we didn’t have to come back the next week. That was incentive enough for me to use all available kid hands to clean my classroom—they were always willing volunteers— and use my Disney Plus subscription to throw on some movies during the useless last couple of days so I could get the paperwork stuff done. Then, on the last day, if she said we didn’t have to come back after the weekend, I told the kids to make sure their parents were on time picking them up on the last day because I wasn’t waiting around for late parents. I would 100% run a kid over and burn rubber in the parking lot on my way out.

And even if it was a year where we had to come back for the teacher workdays, maybe a professional development “thing” had been scheduled, it was still the best 3-day weekend of the entire year. Because the kids were gone. The school year was over. It was the first weekend since the last weekend before school started in August when I had no lesson plans or papers to grade. And not just because I had finished them early and there would be more the next week. I was done, done. For two months. And that weekend was the kick off to those two months. It was always my favorite. The first real time all school year where I could be at ease. No stress. No anxiety. No parent emails. Nothing. The relief was always like I had been holding my breath and could finally breathe deeply again. Definitely the best weekend, but also definitely sad that that’s what made it so good. There should be more weekends like that throughout the year. Every weekend, actually, should be like that. But they’re not.

That’s the reality of every teacher though. My experience was not unique. The countdown to summer break is real. Teacher tired is real. Memorial Day weekend and what it meant for me as a teacher, was real.