We have an interesting little tradition in Utah. Periodically, the Utah Education Association has a conference of some sort, and the kids get a week off from school. There is no holiday associated with it… there’s just a six-day vacation, usually in October.
This year, we planned on going to Seattle for UEA weekend, but obviously had to change our plans due to shifting circumstances. The break from the usual routine really heightens tensions between children in the family. I vaguely remember such vacations as a child being long stretches of boredom after the first day of shouting “Freedom! Freedom!” with joy from the rooftop.
It’s funny how oftentimes getting the thing you want — a break from school, for instance — turns out to be the worst thing for you. I can think of other examples, too, but for some reason I can’t shut off that tiny little part of my brain which refuses to listen to logic when I tell it that I’ll never win the lottery.
Days Off Sometimes Are A Drag
One of the bonuses of working at a Jewish day school these last ten months has been the frequent short days and days off due to holidays. April featured two weeks for Passover and spring break. There was an extra long Memorial Day due to Shavuot. September featured 11 school days out of 20 possibles (and some of those 11 days were half days). The first week of October included another 2.5 days off. And now that the clocks are changing, school on Friday quits early in the afternoon.
All those days off worked out great for the long list of honey-dos at the house (including mucking out the accumulated clutter in the basement and other unfinished storage room for days at a time), but when full five-day work weeks finally started just three weeks ago, it was a bit of a shock. There’s a rhythm to work, we all know that, and we’re geared after exposure to those rhythms to know when you need to be on your game and when its OK to surf your friends’ blog. That rhythm was soundly whacked about the head for me, and frankly, it took a few days to get back into it.
(An aside: my youngest heard me exclaim ‘Frankly, yada yada yada’ to my wife not too long ago, and, not missing a beat, asked me “Daddy, why were you calling Mommy ‘Frankly’?”)
The Hebs
What’s up with all those holidays? It’s like every week is a day off for something? The extended family is always scrambling to cover supervision for the kids during the work week.
Holidays
Apparently we even missed out on a few extra days off this year, as at least Yom Kippur proper fell on a weekend day. The trade-off is that we miss out on some federal holidays (open on Columbus Day and Veterans Day, for instance) but when you toss in the two weeks for the holiday break at the end of the year, the inevitable snow day or delayed opening during the winter, and it still amounts to lots of time off. I really wonder how the faculty manages to squeeze everything in, what with assemblies and field trips mixed in, too. My wife’s school (where both kids go in their respective grades) doesn’t have nearly as many days off throughout the year, and she struggles to cover all the topics she hopes to get in during these nine months.