(A version of this was published in the TES December 2021)
‘It’s Christmas Day’ said Scrooge to himself, ‘I haven’t missed it.’
I wonder how many teachers share Scrooge’s fear that Christmas will pass them by; not in the ‘bah humbug’ sense but by being so absorbed with work we fail to be fully present in the rest of our lives as we sleepwalk to the end of term. Christmas can very much sneak up on us
Allow me to take you on a journey through some of my ghosts of teacher Christmas past. You see, if (as is sometimes claimed) I am an expert in wellbeing, I am that sort of expert that helps others and is sometimes pitifully slow in getting the messages myself. ‘Physician, heal thyself’ says the proverb and I have been a slow learner with regard to Christmas
Absent Present
I remember a few years ago as described in ‘Elephant in the staffroom’ an evening where, having had quite a mauling in a review meeting I attended, yet barely noticed, my son’s Christmas concert. Phrases from the meeting ‘complacent’ ‘done nothing since…’ ‘you’re paid a lot of money to..’ kept bouncing around in my head. I worried about what might happen next; of course those worries about the future didn’t come to pass. They just spoiled the present. It seems that one of the hardest things for teachers, particularly if we have leadership responsibilities, is to avoid the phenomenon of ‘absent presence’
Lesson: Sometimes we have to build boundaries in terms of our time and energy. One of these might be to have a definite ritual in terms of how you ‘clock off’ each day. Is there a walk to the station? A packing away of the school laptop that can give you the mental and physical signal that it is time to switch into non-work mode?
Rest of Life Avoidance
In my second tale of Christmas past I found myself being admitted to hospital with a serious throat condition 4 days before Christmas. I’d ignored various symptoms bravely battling to get marking up to date, all the data on the system, and everything else before the end of term. I had also been doing more of the ‘taxi driving’ as my wife had broken a bone in her elbow earlier that week. Yes, you’ve guessed it. That was also to do with me. She had fallen whilst hanging the outside Christmas lights that I had been ‘too busy’ to do the previous weekend. You see, in my messed up thinking, all those work things needed to be ticked off before the holidays could begin.
Lesson: As I have got older I have got better at making sure that my focus on work doesn’t fall into ROLA (rest of life avoidance). Sometimes this means intentionally adding family events to my work calendar and purposely blocking out time to rest and shop. Just as in work we need to organise to ensure things happen, so too in the rest of our lives.
What really matters?
It was in my very early career that I got my first and biggest lesson in what really matters. We spent our first Christmas as parents in a neo-natal unit eating a lukewarm hospital Christmas dinner. Our son born 12 weeks early weighing less than 600grams had spent his first 9 weeks in an incubator. I had taken some time off work, then gone back to work but barely functioning. As term ended he took a turn for the worse and it looked for a couple of days as if we might lose him. Thankfully he pulled through and it was a special if unusual Christmas. As I returned to work in the January, many books were unmarked, some documents were not filled in, my pigeonhole was full and the displays were still tatty but none of it ended up mattering and no-one gave me any grief about any of it.
Lesson: Perhaps that is the lesson that we are often slowest to learn. That the job we do is important but our health and our families matter much more, that if the worst does happen and we are out of action for a while, things will continue. We are not indispensable at work and we must be careful not to believe our own career hype!
So the challenge for the last weeks of term, whether we celebrate Christmas or not, is to stop, breathe and notice what is around us. Decide what to buy our nearest and dearest, make plans to spend time with a friend, add family events to your diary so that you get the joyous and restful holiday you deserve. In terms of the job, this may involve a few strategic decisions about things to let go in the last week – they can be tackled when we are fresh in the new year!
Our friends, family and our future selves require that we are fully present in the moment. May we learn the lessons of managing the seasonal workload and …
‘as Tiny Tim observed, ‘God bless us, Every One’’
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