Post Academic

One of the undeniably enviable aspects of being an academic is the ample vacation time, including winter break, spring break, and summer vacation. But winter break usually gets eaten up worrying about convention interviews, prepping for convention interviews, going to the convention, then waiting for the results, though, of course, it beats having to go into work on December 31.  Summer vacation might be your best chance to get a solid stretch of time off, but you should be ready to sock away part of it catching up on all the research and work you couldn’t do during the school year then, not to mention that you might want to make some bucks teaching an accelerated and compressed summer school class while picking up a few tutoring gigs along the way.

Spring Break is even more illusory of a break.  Once you finish up giving your final exams, picking up your final papers (and maybe turning in your own if you’re still in coursework), you’re ready to take the weekend off and start planning your time off–except for the big stack of grading to do that you might have to take with you if you go out of town.  And maybe once you get back to the exams and papers, it’s already Tuesday or Wednesday, and you realize you only have one day before you have to input your grades.  Then, that leaves Friday and the weekend off, though you might have had a Tuesday-Thursday schedule last term, so it’s actually no different a weekend than you already have.  Only you have to get ready to teach a new class starting in a few days, so it’s back to prepping the syllabus, planning some ridiculous “ice-breaker” that’s really a diagnostic for the first day of class, and making photocopies.  And in my case, Spring Break generally involves one last winter cold, so that I’m even less motivated and aware to get through the grading.  So at this point, Spring Break basically consists of participating in a fantasy baseball draft.

I know, those of you in the hamster world are crying a river for the academics just about now, right?  But Spring Break is a really good example of how flexible time gives you a false sense of free time and leisure.  So what are the academics reading this doing for spring break, if it’s not the schedule of events I describe above?  And for those post-academics out there, how much do you miss having a spring break?

Photograph of Mission Beach, San Diego, California from Wikimedia Commons, public domain