A different measure of work

Back when I was teaching full-time, a good friend said to me one fine June evening, “You teachers always talk about being underpaid, but you don’t work at all during the summer.” (He was half-kidding, of course. But that also meant he was half-serious.)

So I invited him to follow me around for a summer’s day.

And he took me up on it.

So on our appointed day I called my friend at 5 a.m. (Yes, he was - and remains - that close of a friend) to tell him I was on Facebook. Half-awake, he mumbled, “And you call that work?”

At 7 a.m. I called him back and told him to meet me for breakfast, and that I had been on Facebook messaging back to several of my ex-students over the last two hours. Yep, my ex-students still ask me things, even as adults. Nope, no longer about school, but about life.  

After breakfast my friend and I picked up an ex-jail inmate/student of mine and dropped him off in Johnson City for a job interview (yes, he had a ride back home). On our way back I took my friend on a hike up a trail on Buffalo Mountain.

“You call this work?” my friend asked. So I told him how every step I took would become science knowledge transferred to over two hundred young minds I was meeting at different times to take hiking that summer at Sugar Hollow Park in Bristol.

“Oh, is that a school function?” he asked. “No,” I replied. “I meet groups of kids from Girls Inc., the Boys and Girls Club, local private schools, and Scouts for 2-3 weeks every summer.”