Thursday, February 13, 2014

Finally... Chapter 10 of Blade's Edge!

Well, it took me far longer than I expected to get my act together post having the flu. Still, excuses aren't worth the air it takes to utter them or the script it takes to type them, so without further ado:

Chapter 10 of Blade's Edge: also known as Part Two: Chapter 3

Don't forget to +vote at the end of the chapter! :-)

In other news... Trimester two is rolling to a close here, and Spring Break is only three weeks away. In some ways it feels as though we just got back from winter break, but in others it feels as though it's been a year since we last had time to stop and smell the floral cacti.

Teachers sometimes get flack for the amount of vacation they get, and at boarding schools we get more vacation than most: a week at Thanksgiving, two and a half weeks for the winter holidays, a week in the spring and then nine weeks off over the summer, but many people don't realize how much this kind of work takes out of you. Boarding schools in particular are twenty four hour jobs. We teach from 8am to 4pm then we coach from 4pm until 6pm. Once a week we have duty from 8pm to 10pm and once a month we have to work all weekend to keep students entertained and out of trouble. Then of course, there's prep for classes, writing letters to advisee's parents, writing recommendations, grading, writing grades and comments... etc.. When you live at your workplace it's not surprising that work follows you home. Between all the hats that we wear (teacher, advisor, dorm parent, coach, taxi driver and chaperone) and all of the time we spend working to improve our ability to fill those roles (meetings, workshops, continuing education, reading the latest articles etc.) we have very little in the way of down time when we're not fully on vacation. It really is a twenty four hour job most days, and at best we get a one day weekend (Sundays are full of dorm meetings, prepping for the week to come and, in my case, tech hours for theatrical productions). So when we get our one week stints of true down time, or our final nine weeks of time to reset before the next year begins, it feels not only well deserved, but often like it's not quite enough time.

People who work corporate jobs often look at me like I have two heads when I say this. I suppose I can't blame them. It's quite possible my face might give away some of my abject horror when they tell me that they're not sure if they'll use up all of the three weeks of vacation they've been saving up since the year before.

Different strokes for different folks.

Anyway, this rant brought to you by someone looking forward to their next break from work. Hoping that people on the east coast are staying warm and that everyone else is enjoying the beginning of the end of winter (maybe?). It's certainly starting to look like that here, but then again, by most people's definitions of winter, it never actually started...

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