Summer Break--A Paragraph a Day

When I was younger, it was easy to imagine that my teachers had a nice vacation every summer.  After all, it's a long time off, isn't it?  It's more than eight weeks straight, and most people are lucky to get a couple of weeks in a row.  Now that I'm a teacher, though, I understand just how necessary those breaks are, both for teachers and for students.  Learning takes a lot of work, and people--especially young people--get extremely burned out after eight or nine months of classes.  Right now, for example, we have a few weeks left of class and my students are having a hard time sticking with it.  My colleagues are all walking around exhausted, even though the year isn't quite over yet.  It makes it very clear to me just how important rest is in our lives--without it, we can pretty much never work to our full potential, and achieve the things that we need to achieve.  Rest is part of an important part of the balance between achieving and reinvigorating ourselves, and we need to make it part of who we are.  I have summer break coming up, and the most important part of it for me is using it to rejuvenate, to help myself to be a more effective teacher whenever I'm in the classroom.  I know what it's like to burn out, which is going to happen when we don't make sure that we rest, and I do everything I can to keep burnout at bay.  If we don't rest, we become less effective and less happy with who we are, so it's important that we be sure that we do rest when we have the chance to do so.