Weekends…an evolutionary treatise
I’m not sure if you would say that the changes in how you spend your time on weekends are a product of your age and/or maturity, or it is just the way it is.
The year was 1973. We were part of the merging of two school districts, Wading River and Shoreham. It was the first time that the 6th grades from both districts became one group as part of the now, Shoreham-Wading River Central School district. There were 7 of us.
This was a time before schools were overwhelmed with the State-mandated curriculum. Most of the curriculum that the State gave to you was a recommended curriculum. So we had leeway as to what and how we were going to teach. So here we were, 7 teachers, in a brand new Middle School, in a brand new district, ready to create an exciting curriculum for kids. And we did.
We were a dedicated bunch. At that time we met about 10 hours a week planning new things to do. It was the time of the Open classroom, so we had this large open space that could hold 4 classes. We designed the program so that during mornings my class and two others occupied that open space and in the afternoon, we swapped places with three of the other 6th grade classrooms. There was one hold out who stayed self-contained all day.
A new reading program had us reading countless books and creating activity questions for each of them. There were field trips to plan and units in science, social studies and math that we had to coordinate. On top of the time we spent meeting and planning during school days, there were weekends.
A lot of my weekends were spent doing school work. This went above and beyond the normal amount of time teachers usually spend. For me, this weekend work lasted years beyond those first two years of creating a school. As our teacher’s union became more involved in controlling in-school time used for curriculum and professional development, those long hours of planning in school diminished but not the work done at home.
Then came the mandated curriculums which required more time learning new material and coordinating with everyone else about what and how you were to teach. My weekends were packed. I was not much of a social butterfly, and one of the few that was still unmarried with no family to take care of, so I didn’t understand the impact teaching and free time had on others in my profession.
It was many years later when I found myself getting tired, and overwhelmed with all the work that I was doing that I decided that I wasn’t going to work 7 days a week, which is what teaching was. I made a point to take one day of each weekend totally off from thinking about school. I used that time to relax, read, play sports, go to events, and unwind. It made a big difference. In school, I became more focussed and began to enjoy what I was doing more. I was able to tap into my creativity and try new things, like storytelling and new technology. I even chose to leave my classroom position and teach other subjects. It was a positive change. Weekends were more productive and more fun.
In 1985, I met the woman that I was destined to fall in love with, marry and have a family with. She was a scientist, first working on and attaining her doctorate in geochemistry and then continuing to work ,after our son was born, as a geochemist.
Scientists, for the most part, work on their own, even though they interact with their colleagues and supervisors, their job entails doing lab work and generally work independently.
Teachers on the other hand work in a social institution. They are constantly interacting with people during their workday, whether it be children or adults.
When you’ve been working with gangs of people for 5 days straight and you finally get two days off, what you want to do is not do anything, or at least not have every day scheduled for you to go out and do something. A scientist, on the other hand, has not interacted with many people at all and when they get two days off, they want to do things with others. Go out, go to movies and events, get together with others and do things with their family. Weekends now became a conflict of needs. We had no problem resolving both issues. Having a young child makes a lot of those issues resolve themselves as to what to do. School stuff still had its priority, but so did family and downtime. Weekends were times to accomplish needed and fun things.
And then comes retirement, especially when one person continues to work full time. Now I’m the one with a lot of free time during the week to do what I want. I still teach, I still read and I’m doing a lot more writing. My wife, the scientist, still works. Weekends are together time. I am much more inclined to do things and go places with my wife than sit at home and do nothing, though that also works when we both choose to do that. I don’t have the pressure, most of the time, to have to accomplish something at that moment as I did those first few years. I look forward to our time together.
The final phase of the weekend evolution will occur when my wife joins me in retirement. In theory, then every day will become a weekend. How we plan to use that time is yet to be determined. But I’m sure it will be time well spent.
