Saturday 24 April 2021

What About All Those Long Holidays...?

An extract from Cucarachas or Cucuruchos: An English Teacher's Spanish Dilemma. Free sample chapter available HERE




TEACHING HAS ITS DOWNSIDES: one of the biggest always occurs when people find out what you do. Very few blurt it out immediately. They beat about the bush, asking you which subject you teach, or which age group; they tell stories about teachers they remember (for good or bad); they disclose their favourite subjects, the ones they were good at - and they often want you to know the ones they hated (it's usually PE); they complain about the amount of homework they got (too much) and the amount their own children get (not nearly enough).

But if you're a teacher, you know this is all preliminary. The hors d'oeuvre before the main course, the warm-up before the kick-off, the trailer before the feature. You know what they're going to say, at some point in the conversation (nearly always just after you've expressed a slight dissatisfaction about some educational issue or other): they give you a curt little nod of the head and a slightly accusatory fixing of the eyes before finally saying what they’ve wanted to say since they first discovered you were a teacher.

'Ah, but what about all those long holidays?'

They usually cross their arms at this point, like they’ve caught you telling porkies, or filching a couple of extra pencils from the stock cupboard. They might look sideways at another member of the group and nod another curt little nod like they’ve discovered a new prime number or solved the Irish backstop problem. They wait for me to put up a defence, to say that we need to recover from a full-on job, re-charge our batteries, prepare next year's materials. This is all true. But it's never the response I give.

Instead, I shake my head slightly wistfully, like I've just taken the first lick of a rum'n'raisin ice-cream, then I sigh a little sigh and quietly say, 'Yeah, fantastic. Thirteen weeks... How much holiday do you get...?'

They usually change the subject after that. 

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