A lot of teachers talk to me about their personal lives, or should I say, lack thereof. They complain about the rigors of the job, and wonder how one can possibly go about being a regular, sane person during the year. In fact, some even wonder how they should go about being a regular, sane person over the summer. Some teachers even take their jobs into July and August, teaching summer school, then taking a few weeks to improve curriculum before the next year begins. Then the school year begins again, and guess what? No more personal life.

So what do we do?

Well, if there’s one thing I learned from my Master Teacher it’s this: Your job is not your life.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t be busting your butt every day of the week during the school year. Like Dr. Jeff Duncan-Andrade says in his article here at teach4real.com, teaching is going to be hard, and you need to be willing to throw yourself into the fray. If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t be teaching. You need to dedicate every working hour to making yourself a better teacher and improving the lives of the kids in your class. It is the painful path, and you need to walk it every day of the week. I completely agree – that is, until you get home.

Once you get home, you need to lead a life like a normal person, or at least what passes for normal in your own mind. Do the things you want to do, not the things you need to do. The same goes for summer vacation.

Here’s the thing. I have a colleague who stays late, comes in on weekends, and even spends time in his room over summer break. Teaching is his life. But to this man, he has no qualms about it. He doesn’t complain. He doesn’t wish he had a more exciting personal life. But that is because he WANTS teaching to be his life. He likes being in his classroom twelve hours a day, and you will never hear him say otherwise. That said, he still has a pretty active social life. But to be honest, his life is his job – and he is okay with that.

Of course this guy is the exception. I think most of us do the best we can at work, but don’t think of our job as our life. Perhaps we should (Dr. Andrade certainly would say so), but I think there is a fine line between keeping your sanity and dedicating yourself to any one thing for more than 10 hours a day.

Again, you might be asking me, what do we do then?

Here are some ideas:

1. Don’t take papers home. A veteran colleague of mine once told me it took her four years before she quit taking papers home to grade. For myself, it took me half that time, but most of it was procedural. Once I got my procedures in order, I was good to go. I also found I wasn’t very efficient at home anyway. I would get twice as much done just by staying an extra hour at work than grading with a beer in my hand watching the NBA playoffs on my couch. So don’t take your work home with you – instead, work on your life at home.

2. When you do get home, do what you want to do. Too many teachers complain about not having a life outside the classroom, but when you ask them what they do at home they don’t have interesting answers. If you are like my friend, maybe deep down you want to be grading papers at home. Maybe you have dedicated yourself to the good fight without even knowing it, and when faced with something else, you have nothing you want to do. But if you find yourself complaining about it, you need to ask yourself a simple question: What do I want to be doing? You want to go to the gym three days a week? Then do it. You want to go on more eHarmony dates? Schedule them. You want a life outside of teaching? First you need to figure out what that is.

3. Please, oh please, don’t talk about teaching the moment you get off work. Sometimes I say “no” to going out with people at my school because I just don’t want to talk about education. To tell you the truth, I avoid those little get-togethers like the plague. The last thing I want to do after work is bitch about my job with seven other angry teachers. I have three trusted friends who are also in the field who I can whine to in private. But when I go out to have a good time, the last thing I want to do is talk about teaching. Unfortunately I think that makes me different from almost everyone.

4. Travel. This summer, don’t sit around just to enjoy the absence of teenage shouting. Go somewhere cool. And please, please, please, LEAVE THE UNITED STATES. Save the quick trips to the cabin, or the lake, or your sister’s house, for the holidays and three day weekends. Over summer, you need to get out of this country. Of course, we can’t all afford to do this every year, but ask yourself when the last time you left the country was. If it was more than two or three years ago, you need to open a new window on your computer screen and buy a plane ticket immediately. Don’t go to Mexico (too dangerous right now), and don’t go to Canada (too close). Go to the crazy country you’ve always had in the back of your mind. Take a Spanish class while you’re there. Get a tattoo. Go to the Amazon (seriously, I just went, look up Iquitos, Peru). Going to another country is seriously the best advice I can give you. It’s like we always tell our students: “No one ever regrets going to college.” Well, no one ever regrets doing a month on the Mediterranean either.

Whatever you decide to do, what may be most important is deciding what you want to do outside of your teaching job. If you are one of those people who wishes they had a life outside of the job, you need to figure out what you want that to be. Maybe like my colleague, you’ll figure out you’re spending all your time at work and grading papers at home because that is truly what makes you happy. At least then maybe you’ll start enjoying the long hours more and stop wondering if there is something more out there. But if you know what that something more is, you just don’t have time to do it, the answer is simple: Make time. You are an adult, and your job doesn’t have to be your life if you don’t want it to.

So stop taking papers home, figure out what it is you want your real life to look like, stop complaining about your job even when you’re at the bar, and please oh please, get the hell out of this country and see something of the world.

Go up to FILE/ NEW WINDOW, and then go to www.Expedia.com. Buy a plane ticket to a country whose name you can’t pronounce, and have the return flight come back in a month. I promise you won’t regret it, although, you might regret not doing it.

And maybe, just maybe, while you’re abroad, you’ll figure out what it is you want to be doing when you’re not saving the world.