Summertime, When the Living Is ... Easy? A Teacher's Perspective

The other day, I read an interview with Audra McDonald in which she talked about how hard it is to sing the beautiful lullaby “Summertime,” from Porgy and Bess, which comes at the end of the opera. The vocal demands of the song would be challenging at any point, but at the end of a performance, when the singer’s voice is tired from all that went before, soaring to those high, high notes and controlling the low, rich notes, demands an extraordinary amount of sheer determination.

I could relate to that, although I’m no longer much of a singer. It just brought to mind the way both teachers and students often waste a lot of time dreaming about the glories of summer, glories that lie ahead like a prize at the end of a race. But when we get there? Oh. Oops. That’s when we find we have to keep right on performing, albeit on a different stage.

Remember how, when you were a kid, you spent the last week of school in a kind of barely-controlled frenzy, desperate for the sound of the final bell? It’s about the same for teachers, except that they have to stay there a few days longer, filing things and taking down classroom decorations and bulletin boards, covering shelves to keep out summer’s dust. They fill out inventories and requisitions, submit work orders for the summer crew to consider, and write notes to parents who were nice enough to give them small thank-you presents.

A little aside about the latter, for anyone who is looking for a teacher-gift: the best one I ever received came from a parent who had recently acquired a pasta machine. She appeared at my classroom door late one afternoon during the classroom cleanup time, when I was elbow-deep in a bucket of water, washing something like 500 large, wooden “unit blocks.” She carried a bag of fresh, homemade fettuccine, a small container of shredded Parmesan, and a pint of homemade sauce. “Here’s tonight’s supper,” she said. “I thought it might be helpful at the end of a long day.” I managed not to embarrass us both by falling into her arms, but just barely. The last thing a teacher should have to consider, while winding up the school year and closing down her classroom, is what the heck to fix for her family’s dinner, especially when the last few days have seen an overdose of pizza/fast-food burgers/what’s-left-from-last-night suppers.

I’ve always contended that the very best of summer vacation comes before you’ve had a chance to squander even a minute of its glory. Coming home and — whether you were student or pupil — flopping on the sofa in a kind of mindless haze, or sitting on the porch with something cold and wet to drink, seems glorious. Oh, it’s nice to be able to sleep in the next morning, too, but when you do that, you’ve already wasted a few precious minutes of your freedom, and summer is already starting to run away from you.

The first nudges of reality usually come when you — full of energy and purpose — start on that list of must-do’s you have been keeping all year. The garden, which has already gotten a head start during the last couple of months, demands your attention first, and with incredible persistence. A garden in summer is the definition of a work (and work and work) in progress.

So are all the little, niggly household chores you have put off during the past frantic weeks, things like tackling the pile of ironing you ignored during exam week, which for you included making up the exam, providing a classroom review of the material covered, proctoring, and grading. Factoring in all that, “exam week” really counts as two or three weeks. Add in end-of-school parties and graduation and you have a long spell of household neglect.

Having taken care of the most pressing matters, you finally have that chance to: paint the bathroom; get behind the computer desk to straighten out and dust the cords; patch the chipped sink; wash the bedroom curtains which used to be white cotton eyelet but have somehow segued into an alarming shade of beige; tackle the very dirty basement; have an annual physical exam and perhaps dental surgery; etc. etc. etc.

If you have children, you must start the endless round of pick-up-and-deliver to day camp or swimming pool or tennis lesson. You gather the family to watch, i.e. to support, the youngest in his first baseball game, or the eldest in a diving meet, or the middle child at her dance or piano recital.

You will find yourself hosting the sleepovers you put off all winter, promising “we’ll do that in the summer, when school’s out and Mom has more time.” You’ll spend rather more hours at the grocery store, as well as in food preparation, not only trying to make up for all those “quickie” meals you threw at your family during the school year, but also because it can take a lot more time to prepare a nutritious, tasty, cold supper on a hot summer day than it does to drop something into the slow cooker on a cold winter’s morning, counting on the welcoming scent of a tasty meal when you walk in the door at day’s end, with leftovers for another night to boot.

You will also have to find a way to fit in your Continuing Education classes at the local college, earning the credits that every school teacher has to collect so that she’ll be ready when her teaching certificate comes up for renewal. It’s a fine way to help a teacher stay up on all the latest knowledge in her field, but it plays hob with a summer schedule. Think twice before you express envy for those of us who “only have to work for 10 months of the year.”

And along about August, when others are planning their Labor Day escapes, teachers are again revving up, thinking about new ways of sparking the natural curiosity that makes kids learn with energy and delight. Teachers will be planning new ways of organizing their classrooms, moving furniture around, creating new, interesting areas, as well as new, interesting lesson plans.

By the time the children show up, a good teacher will already have spent several days in the classroom, labeling things, setting out materials, sprucing up the place with posters and plants and all sorts of whiz-bang electronics that they have mastered over the summer.

A word of advice: don’t go by your child’s classroom during those “getting ready” days. You’ll probably find the teacher deeply involved in classroom preparation, wearing ratty old clothes and painting something that stands on a newspaper in the middle of the room. Of course, they'll stop whatever they were doing, and try to be polite to the parent and welcoming to the child, but it really isn’t the time to socialize. Leave the moment of meeting until that glorious first day, when the room isn’t in chaos, and everyone, even the teacher, is clean and smiling. From there on, we hope, it’s all downhill until the next Summertime.

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Summertime, When the Living Is ... Easy? A Teacher's Perspective

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