Yes, school's out for summer and it has been for three weeks in my neck of the woods. Strange to me that we get out for summer break in the middle of spring and start back to school in the middle of summer, but if that's how the powers that be want to schedule things, I am more than happy to go along with whatever they decide as long as I get the time off from teaching.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not lazy. My family can attest to that. My oldest son says I'm like a gerbil on crack, always moving, always completing a project, always doing something. I mean, here it is, a Sunday afternoon, and a lot of people my age are taking naps. Naps are not for me. Never have liked them. When I start liking them, you'll know I'm truly old or truly sick.

I'm not afraid of work. My dad started me working part-time with a paper route when I was 12, a job I kept until I was 14. It didn't take long to do each Friday afternoon, but at that age, it felt like eternity. Then he had me working two afternoons a week "stuffing" newspapers at the newspaper plant he managed. "Stuffing" papers is using glycerin on your hands to grab circulars or special sections of the newspaper to insert inside of another section. Large newspapers have machines that do it. Our small town had people. Like me, working alongside adults for two hours two afternoons a week. Once again, an eternity. When I was sixteen, he had me typing eight hours a day, four days a week. And so on and so on. My dad taught me to work.

But teaching. . .it's a different animal. I worked in banking for over eight years before I decided to enter the classroom as an ill-prepared French teacher. Oh, I was prepared for the French part. What I wasn't prepared for was the teaching part. I had never taken an education class or done one day of student teaching, so you can imagine how my year started.

Lesson #1 in teaching: if you start the year wrong, you're sunk for the rest of the year. The students take their cue the first day of class. If you come across as a push-over, that's exactly how they will treat you.

Add classroom management problems to learning how to design a lesson plan that is effective and manageable during the 50-minute class period and grading papers and notifying parents when students are struggling and sponsoring a club or two and working ballgames and taking education classes at the local university at night. . .Did I mention my first year of teaching was the absolute worst year of my life?

It was 30 years ago and I still try to block it from my memory. I felt like a total failure. I was a failure. I had gone from a self-confident loan officer and vice-president of a bank (yes, I did take a pay cut) to an obviously ineffective teacher who didn't know what she was doing. Luckily for me and my students, I finally figured it out and hopefully I've done and continue to do an okay job. But for the first five years -- oh, how I wanted to go back to banking and the adult world!

Why, you may wonder, did I stick with it? Truthfully, I did it because I was a mom and I wanted mom-friendly hours. I wanted to be at home when my children were out of school.

But no one told me that instead of working 40 to 45 hours a week like I did at the bank that I would be working 50 plus hours every week during the school year. So those mom-friendly hours weren't all that friendly during the school year, especially when my own children needed help with homework and I had 130 tests to grade.

Lesson #2 in teaching: if you do the job right, you will put in nine to ten hours or more every day including some work on the weekends. Saturday nights at home often mean grading papers while I semi-watch a television program. You have other assignments. If you teach in middle or high school, you have ballgames to work and also to attend. You are part of the school community, so you need to support the students in their extra-curricular efforts such as drama productions, fund-raisers, musical performances, and more.

I've gotten lazy after 30 years of it. I love my students and want to support them, but I don't go as much as I used to. I'm 60. I'm tired. But I'm still interested in the kids and what they accomplish.

Lesson #3 in teaching: if you want to be a really good teacher, you'd better learn how to act, at least a little. There are days you're just not going to be on top of your game. Your patience will be running short. You will have a personal problem eating at you and you don't want to teach those students the difference in a noun and a pronoun. Kids in high school are very perceptive. They'll figure out very quickly that something is wrong. If you don't want them know how you're feeling, act like everything's great. Especially when you've taught the same lesson six times that day and you think you're going to throw up if you have to teach it again. Well, maybe throw up is a harsh reaction. Let's just say you're tired at that point, but you need to be energetic.

Yes, school is out for summer. Teachers are catching up on lost sleep and enjoying some time off. A few are teaching summer school (bless their hearts, I've done it, meaning I had four weeks off in the summer). Some will be attending workshops or taking additional classes over the summer. Others will be looking for another job all summer and then resign themselves to staying with teaching when they can't find anything in their small town that pays as well as teaching does. And most, believe it or not, will already be thinking of next year and making plans for their new crop of students, thinking about how they will improve or change what they did the year before. It's just what teachers do.

Teaching is one of the hardest jobs I've ever had. (I was a principal for seven years, so I will reserve that experience for another blog). I envied teachers and their time off when I worked at the bank. After my first year, I realized if teachers had to teach 50 weeks out of the year like most jobs, no one would do it. It's tough, if done correctly.

But it's rewarding. I love my students. . . well, most of them. Maybe I love all of them, even the ones who aren't so likable, because I care about them and their futures. After all, agape love wants what is best for others, so I feel that for my students. I love my co-workers. We are part of a huge fraternity, and you can't really understand it unless you're one of us. We get it. Until you've walked in our shoes, you don't.

So to all of you teachers out there -- enjoy your summer. July 4 will be here before you know it (and admit it, when July 4 gets here you think the summer is almost over). To those of you not in education and working all summer, keep in mind that teaching is not what you think it is and maybe you made the right decision after all. :)