On Friday after school I headed home via the supermarket. At the checkout, the assistant asked me if I’d finished work for the week.

“Oh yes,” I said with a sigh of relief.

“Teacher, are you?” he said.

I glanced down. I wasn’t wearing my lanyard, there was no green ink on my hands, no exercise books spilling from my bag.

“Yes!” I said. “How can you tell?”

“Oh, I can always spot them this time of year,” he told me sagely. “I’ve had loads of teachers in tonight and they’re all buying alcohol.”

I walked to the car musing on his ability to spot a teacher in the wild. Maybe it wasn’t so difficult after all - at this point in the year most of us are 98 per cent teacher, 2 per cent human. The second half of the summer term gets you like that. At half term, non-teachers will cheerfully say things like, “Only another seven weeks and you’re on holiday again.” They don’t realise that those seven weeks will put you through the wringer like no other time of year and that when you finally reach said summer holidays the previous half term has become another country.

Life outside of teaching

It’s not just the reports to write and assessments to mark and numbers to crunch. It’s not only that summer productions and every sporting event that hasn’t happened all year come together to fill your weeks. Your class is decimated, you desperately need to finish schemes of work and finding a date when no child is out for an athletics tournament or on a transition event is nigh on impossible.

Then there are the children themselves. Assessments are done, timetables are prone to being disrupted, classrooms overheat - children pick up on these things and some of them take it as their last opportunity to throw some new behaviour challenges your way.

Finally, the term comes to an end and you’re washed up on the shores of exhaustion, relief and guilt that you didn’t do enough before spending six weeks recovering and gearing up to do it all again next year.

For the vast majority of my existence, I have kept pace with the rise and fall of the school year and, in all honesty, I quite like it. Only, at the moment, I’m beginning to wonder if I might break out of the cycle. My short-term contract is up. I haven’t lined up a job for September (but then again I haven’t really tried to), and I’m tentatively contemplating the possibility of having “time off”. 

But to do what? What does life outside of the classroom look like? Do I dust down my skills and go in search of alternative employment? (Surely there is an employer somewhere just crying out for someone with a 100m swimming badge and Grade 5 trumpet?). Maybe I could try my hand at being a stay-at-home mum, but there’s always the worry that people will expect my house to be clean and my kids to be reading Dostoevsky and eating organic avocado.

Then there’s a genuine concern that I simply won’t cut it in the non-teaching world. Have I evolved past being able to work with adults? Would I be able to stop myself from correcting their grammar?

A teacher I work with reckons a small amount of time away can be beneficial and she may well be right, but I have found myself wondering about the return journey. If I step off the ride now, will I ever get back on again?

Jo Brighouse is a pseudonym for a primary teacher in the West Midlands. She tweets @jo_brighouse