Cruelty Free

 It will be good to take a break. 

It's Spring, after all. 

Whoever said "March is the cruelest month," was probably an elementary school teacher. T.S. Eliot may have been on a different calendar, but it has been a month and a half since we have experienced anything like a standing eight count here in the trenches, and we are ready. 

More than ready.

I have written here before about the mild shame I sometimes feel when I remember previous jobs, like when I worked at a book warehouse where the only days we got off were those taken by UPS. Those were ten hour days, and plenty of times when we had to work a little longer just to be sure that we got the orders out the door. 

Now I live in a world with an "academic calendar," which includes the last Friday of March "in lieu of Cesar Chavez Day." I'll be taking that, thank you very much. I will happily avoid my school site for the week following, with the added incentive of having just forty school days left once we return.

I am not certain at all whether I have always felt this level of exhaustion creeping into Spring Break. I know that the days leading up to Winter Break were tenuous, but the idea of being wrung out and spent like I am currently suggests that it is a cumulative effect. The number of Springs that have been broken over the course of my teaching career is beginning to limit my capacity to rebound. The phrase, "I could really use a vacation," comes far more easily to mind than it used to. 

Then again, a fourth grade girl, one possessed with a rather large personality, showed up just after lunch this past Tuesday. When our principal asked where she had been, expecting a doctor or dentist appointment as the excuse, this personality-laden fourth grader replied lazily, "I was sleeping." I've done a few tours of Fourth Grade. I get it. 

We could all use a break.