Career doctor

Lazy days

With four weeks still to go until the end of term, no one at our school appears to be doing any work. How can I get my pupils to use their time productively?

What are you like? You spend 90% of the year telling everyone you are being crushed by an intolerable workload and that you are thinking of leaving the profession; now you've been cut some slack, you're suddenly overwhelmed by guilt. If you're worried that taxpayers might be unhappy about your lack of activity, then relax. By and large, teachers still retain the public's goodwill - which is more than can be said for the politicians, who are about to embark on the longest summer recess in parliamentary history. By most people's reckoning, three and a half months off isn't so much a holiday as a career break.

If you want to know why most secondary schools have ground to a near-standstill by the middle of June, you might try having a word with the exam boards. Key stage 3 Sats are done and dusted long before June even starts, and come the middle of the month even GCSEs have just about fizzled out.

Most heads also schedule the school's internal end-of-year exams to be wrapped up before half-time, so the net result is that pupils and teachers alike think there is nothing to play for for the rest of the academic year. And when nearly every school measures its success or failure almost entirely in terms of exam results, who can blame them?

But I accept you do have a problem. Just because there is a tacit agreement that both you and the students will be taking it a bit easy, it doesn't mean you're going to be happy to take it easy in the same way. My guess is that your idea of a cushy time involves reading a few books and nibbling a few strawberries while watching Wimbledon, before moving on to something rather more substantial as the Aussie cricket team lurches from one defeat to the next. I rather suspect that many of your students would find all this about as dull as they find many of their lessons, since what they want to do is gossip, compare mobile phones and generally hang about. So any idea of coming to some arrangement whereby you promise not to bother them if they don't bother you is doomed to failure - especially in this heat, when everyone is even tetchier than usual.

The obvious answer would be to designate all your classes "field study work" and move them outdoors, as this gives everyone the perfect cover for some aimless mooching. Sadly, it's generally a non-starter in most schools, as there's next to nowhere within the school grounds for anyone to go.

Where does this leave you? I suspect you are beginning to realise that too much leisure time can be immensely stressful. So why not keep things simple? Stick to what you know and try teaching as normal. You won't get any thanks from your colleagues, but there's a limit to how much of nothing anyone can do. Even teenagers.

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