I recently took a few weeks off over the holidays from teaching. My goal for this break was to not do anything teaching, business or blog related and just enjoy family. I did great the first week! I had a few days before my daughter, husband and “granddogs” arrived. Once they arrived, we enjoyed each others company, made Christmas treats, watched Christmas movies, went out and saw Christmas lights and just enjoyed the holidays overall. I even watched a Disney movie I wanted to see for a while but never had the chance to catch it in the theatres (yay Disney+). Oh wait! Now that I think about it, I did respond to some lesson inquiries… Oh, and I did hold a introductory/evaluation interview with a family which is a good hour of my time. Then corresponding back and forth with said interview which is several more hours over time… Hmmm… did I say I did great the first week?The next week was Christmas week so not doing anything work related was easier. Let me pause for a second to see if I did anything work related… oops! Looks like I did respond to one inquiry. Not to bad though. Phew!

This week is New Years and panic has officially set. I realized on the 30th that I needed to scramble and get some important to do’s done before the spring semester kickoff starts next week! In addition, I had newsletters to write, a New Years resource to finish off… Ack! So within 2 days I was able to pump out the top proriority to do’s before ringing in the New Year. The good news is, none of this prevented me from spending quality time with my family. I got what I absolutely needed to get done and then shut it down.

Can teachers truly take a break? There is always so much to do! There are so many behind the scenes of what we do and we have to be careful to not let too many ball drops or they can all come tumbling down before we know it! I know I’m preaching to the choir when I say, a teachers job is never done. 

However I am also a big propenent of taking breaks. They are VERY important! They help keep us centered and can help prevent burnout. Burnout is one of those little gremlins that can sneak up on you when you least expect it. We go, go, go and have a hard time saying no and before we know it we just want to be done. Which is one of the reasons why I schedule breaks often during the year. 

Oh boy, taking a true break is hard to do especially when you are a teacher! I had great intentions with my goal of doing nothing related to my work over my holiday break. It was a good goal. It was a goal I needed because I tend to be a workaholic so it kept me from working too much and truly enjoying my break. I did the absolute bare minimum in order for all the balls not to all come falling down on me. Sometimes cleaning up those dropped balls is more stressful then just handling them one at a time. So when it’s all said and done I think I did a pretty good job.