Bye, Bye Bye

This weekend, the professional football team that I follow regularly will be taking what might be considered a well-deserved week off. This is called a bye week, as in: bye to the stress, bye to the strain, bye to the rhythm that has brought us to this point. It is an opportunity to sit back and lick the wounds from previous weeks and prepare for the long haul that will be the rest of the season. My question is this: Why don't I get a bye week?
Professional football players and coaches play sixteen regular season games, preceded by four before that that are exhibition, and if they are extraordinarily successful they might get another three after that in the post-season. If you toss in an extra pre-season game for the primary purpose of getting the year off to an early start, a professional football team will play a maximum of twenty-five games over the course of a season. Twenty-five weeks adds up to roughly half a year. That means that about halfway through that half-year, they all sit down and take a break. In my life, this is known as Christmas Break. For two weeks all the teachers and kids go home and prepare for the second half of the year.
Just like the NFL, sometimes game plans change. The rosters are also up for revision as kids move away or arrive at our school ready to find their place on the team. This year we even have a couple of teachers going out on injured reserve. How will this impact our performance heading into the playoffs? We hope that the third grade equivalent of Randy Moss doesn't land on our doorstep. The waiver procedure in elementary school is a little more complex than that found in the NFL, but if he can bring our test scores up, we will find a way to work with him. I don't think we would let him interview himself, however.