Locust Days Off

It feels like we've been out of school more than we've been in it recently, and when I checked the calendar last weekend, I found that I was right. During the second academic quarter, which ran from November 3 to February 1, students had 44 days in school and 46 days out of it (including weekends, holidays, teacher workshops, and two weather-related days off). Tomorrow will mark the end of the first uninterrupted three-week stretch we will have enjoyed since the first three weeks of December.

'Enjoyed' may seem like an odd verb to use in that sentence, but the fact is that vacations, holidays, and unanticipated breaks can be a problem for a teacher. It's nice to have time off, of course. But in the strictest sense, it's not time off at all -- teachers in the ConVal district contract to work 187 days per academic year, and if schools are closed for a blizzard, a day of -40 wind chill (as happened January 16th), or even a plague of locusts, we just tack another day onto the end of June.

One of the hardest things for me to get used to when I became a teacher was the peculiar, syncopated rhythm of the school year. Each academic quarter contains 45 school days, but the ratio of school days to days off can vary wildly. This year, for example, Quarter One, from the day teachers reported back to work to the day the next quarter began, was 70 days long. Quarter Two, however, lasted 91 days. Quarters Three and Four will be about ten weeks each, depending on how many locust-days we have to make up.

There are big psychological differences between a five-day school week and one that has been shortened for whatever reason. It takes part of Monday for a lot of students to recover from the weekend, and over the last half of Friday the antsiness gets intense. A four-day week isn't bad in terms of keeping kids on the ball, but a three-day week is difficult to plan, and a two-day week, such as the one we had just before Thanksgiving, is virtually useless. Lots of parents like to get a jump on holiday traffic, or take advantage of cheaper air fares, so they pull their kids out a day or two early and often return a day or two late. When a third of your class is missing, you show a lot of videos.

Another problem is that when students return from time off, there's slippage. When my freshmen came back from the four-day Veteran's Day weekend last November -- their first holiday since Labor Day -- their average score on essays dropped six points. After two weeks away over Christmas and New Year's, their performance on weekly oral presentations was appallingly bad. It felt like we were starting over.

That's why the last three weeks have been good. Everybody started fresh with new classes in February, and mine are coming together nicely as we all find our rhythm. What they'll be like after having next week off is anybody's guess.

The good news is that when they get back, we'll have eight straight weeks of classes with only one school day off, a chance to develop some real academic momentum -- assuming there are no locusts.