When I was a kid, one of my favorite times of the year was the last day of school. The feeling of freedom that came from that moment was exciting. I did not know what adventures the summer months held while the plans I made to make sure that I got the most out of my time were often ambitious and could never be accomplished. I am sure that many students have felt the same way that I did, and this is the reason that summer still holds a special place in our hearts still today.
Oddly enough, another of my favorite times of the year came at the end of the summer when I would return back to school. The ambitions of summer would never come to fruition, and though the imposing thought of sitting in a school desk loomed ever larger on the horizon, I would welcome those moments with the same kind of excitement that I had at the beginning of the summer. I don’t know why I got excited about both of these opposing moments of a young man’s year, but I did. It might have had something to do with a change of pace and being ready to take on the challenges that that change presented to me.
When I grew older and graduated from college, I joined the working class, and soon realized that this feeling that came from the beginning and end of summer did not hold as much significance. I was no longer given that time off, and the daily grind of my work life just continued on with the difference being that the days were now hotter and I did not want to go outside. In fact, I started to dread this time of the year because of this. It was the fall and spring months that started to get me excited about the world around me, and once again it might have been because the demonstrated a time of change instead of the same old boring routine.
Of course, all of this changed since I have gone back to academia, and have taken a job as a teacher. The joy that I used to feel at the beginning of summer once again returned. There was a similar reason to it, but the main one being that I could unwind from a busy school year so I could be ready for the next one. Of course, there have always been big plans for the summer, but my ambition switched from getting the most out of my time to finding a place where I could relax and just take in the time that was given to me.
Summer became even more exciting when I took my talents and started teaching internationally. When I was working as a teacher in the States, we always took a couple of weeks to travel to the Pacific Northwest to visit family, and every once in a while, we went off of the beaten path that we always took to explore other parts of the United States. Though I still come back to the United States every summer to visit family, I get the opportunity to take a couple of weeks at the beginning or end of the summer to explore a corner of the world that I have never seen before. I would have never thought that when the ambition of my youth was combined with adulthood, I would be able to accomplish those goals that I set out to do at the beginning of the summer. At the same time, it would also be the relaxation I would need to be able to get back in front of the class and have the energy to teach for one more year.
Now that we have reached the month of August and the joys of summer are starting to wind down, do I still feel the same sense of excitement that I did in my younger days for the beginning of school? Yes, of course I do. It is that sense of change that I seem to love so much except it is a little different now than when I was a student. I do enjoy getting back to my home after a long time away, and being able to see all of my friends again. I also like no longer having to live out of suitcase, and having my own space again.
I love all of the travels I have been able to experience this summer, and I appreciate you coming along for the ride. I also enjoy having that time to be able to spend with family and friends as I think of it as one of the most important things we can do as people. That is where the joy of life truly comes. But as they say in the real world, it is time pay the bills. It is time to get back to work. I am just lucky that I enjoy my job and it gives me time to have a lifestyle like the one that I have.
So as I close the door on another summer, I am glad to take this moment of reflection and look at all of the places I have been and the people I have seen. I look forward to my next adventure though it may be a little ways away. I hope that you can join me for it when that time comes along.
The world needs to beware. Teachers everywhere are putting away their red pens and lesson plans, and are making their way to the far reaches of the globe. It is summer time, and there will be a need for these people to unwind. For all teachers, the release at the end of the year is a time where they can let out that breath they have been holding on to. The kids have been on edge because they know the end is near, and the older they get, the more stressful it becomes for them. But after that final bell rings, and everybody floods out of the building for the summer months, there is a collective sigh. It is over, and we can recharge our batteries, and find a way back to that sanity we all crave.
For international school teachers, there is another layer to this. Most of them live thousands of miles from their family and friends. They do build many relationships with the people that they work with, but it is those other relationships that they wish to return to. Their new found home, wherever that may be, becomes a burden at the end of the school year, and they wish to escape to different environments.
This is where the freedom flight comes in.
Many international teachers wait a couple of days before they board that flight to their adventure for the summer. It gives them a couple of days to unwind. But there is another group of teachers who will throw a bunch of clothes in a bag, and rush to the airport a couple of hours after they have clocked out for the last time. Even before the clock strikes midnight, they are on a flight to a different part of the world. This is known as the freedom flight. It is an escape from the daily grind to try to grab as much of summer as they can. It can induce a different kind of stress than what is presented during the school year. They feel like they are leaving something important behind, and they are not quite sure if they will make it to that plane in the first place. But the rewards are worth the effort.
I woke up in the afternoon on the day after my last day in school in a completely different country with a completely different ecosystem. I had left behind the hot, dusty streets of Amman, and was in the cooler, tree lined boulevards of Tbilisi. Responsibility had been placed on hold, and I could now focus on different important things in life such as enjoying a great meal, and having my first adult beverage of the summer season. It only took a night of flying and a distance of about 900 miles to have a change of perspective and attitude.
It is a great way to start the summer, and I am already feeling the stress of the school year wash away as I prepare for a couple of months of rest and relaxation. I hope you join me on my adventures as I travel around the world, and if not, I hope it is because you are out there enjoying your own freedom flight.
It has been a long time since I have seen this view, the city of Amman from my back porch. I spend a lot of my time during the school year looking over this perch, and it has been almost ten weeks since I have been back. When I was younger, this was a normal amount of time for summer break, but the schools have slimmed them down a bit. There are numerous reasons for this. Schools wish to have more breaks during the school year to help reduce the pressure that many students feel at certain points of the schedule. Districts also wish to reduce the summer slide when students put the books down and pick up the game console controllers. It is also a long time to be a way from work, and by the end of it, people are bored, no longer being productive about anything in their lives. This is the reality for many schools around the world, but for me this year, it was not the case. There were a couple of complications with the way the holidays landed this year that complicated things, and extended the summer. The school I work for now also does not believe in the smaller breaks, following the work hard, play hard philosophy. Because of these things, I have had a long summer to explore the world.
When I first thought about what this prospect of a long summer meant for me, I started to think about how I would spend my time. Most of the time, I head back to the United States and visit with family and friends, but there is a limit you can stay at a place before you wear out your welcome. I prefer to have my time spent with these people to be quality time, and not just passing the time. Also considering that the last couple of years had made travel difficult and I now had an opportunity to see a part of the world I never had before, we made arrangements to spend the first part of the summer in Iceland.
Iceland seemed lie the perfect place to go in a world still getting over its post-Covid hangover. The danger of the disease still lurked around every corner even though right before we boarded the plane to start on our travels, the United States followed suit with a lot of the other countries in the world, and decided to no longer make having a negative PCR test part of flying into the country. Everything was coming together to make for a great summer of travel. Still, it was going to be nice to be in a country without many people in it and the main attractions that tourist go and see being outside. We didn’t even need to worry about catching the disease in hotel rooms because we spent our time traveling around the island in a camper van and rarely did we have contact with other people.
Still, this did not make our travels easy in Iceland. We ran into rain and cold weather during most of our three weeks we were there. The people we did interact with told us time and time again that Iceland was experiencing the coldest June in thirty years. It created some challenges along the way, and there were many nights that we were huddled up in our van staying warm in our sleeping bags while waiting out the rain and blowing wind that was beating itself against the side of our vehicle.
Still, there were plenty of moments where the sun came out and we took advantage of those times to gaze upon the beauty of Iceland. It was the perfect way to start this long summer. I was able to let go of all the stress and pressure that comes with the school year, and concentrate on something else. I didn’t have a lot of down time that usually comes from vacation, but it was okay because I had plenty of time later on to take advantage of that. I also did not experience a lot of heat, but I knew I would eventually run into it when I made it to the second part of my trip Oregon in the United States.
But the Pacific Northwest can be a fickle place as well. My father-in-law is always telling me that he never expects it to get warm in Oregon until after the Fourth of July, and not to get mad if it doesn’t happen until after the fifteenth of the same month. Well, this summer put that saying to the test. I would like to say that I had made it all the way to the 24th without experiencing a day over 90, but that was not the case.
There were two days early on in the month where we traveled down to Tucson, Arizona to attend the wedding of a couple of friends from both Korea, and Jordan. We ran into day over 100 degrees there, but if they weren’t that hot in mid-July there, I would have been worried. The wedding wasn’t an actual wedding either. The happy couple had gotten married the previous summer to allow them to move to Jordan without any trouble. The problem with that first ceremony was that it only involved a handful of people due to the speed in which it happened and the fact that the world was still in lockdown during the summer of 2021. This time around was a celebration of a marriage that had already happened, but it was with all of the people they would have invited if it wasn’t for those strange circumstances surrounding their first ceremony. It was more than just a celebration of love because a lot of the people invited to the ceremony were also people I had worked with in Seoul, and had not seen since I had left that country. It became a reunion as well from people who live all over the world now. The world had moved on from Covid and was willing to get back together again. All of these things were expressed in that tiny ceremony, and it was one of the highlights of this summer, right around the halfway point of my time off as well.
I did not get to enjoy the heat for long though because it was back to the Pacific Northwest, and though I got a couple of days in the high 80s in Central Oregon, we left that behind to go up to the Puget Sound of Washington. Being so close to the ocean so far north meant cooler days, and nights where we actually built a fire to enjoy the evening outside. It was around this time that I was hearing about the heat that the rest of the country was experiencing and I felt really lucky that I kept avoiding it. I was even able to dodge that bullet when those temperatures finally hit the Pacific Northwest by making the jump to another part of the country, but I knew that I had a long way to go this summer, and there was no way I could avoid it forever.
But I wasn’t that far north to enjoy the weather. It was for another celebration that was put on hold because of, once again, Covid. My in-laws had been planning a little getaway for their whole family to celebrate one of them hitting a significant milestone in age, and both of them celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. This trip had been scheduled early in 2020 before Covid became a worldwide pandemic. I remember many conversations from that year about whether the trip should be canceled or not. It is funny looking back and thinking that it would have been a possibility in 2020, but I am sure many people had the same kinds of conversations. I am just happy that we were able to eventually get to celebrating these moments, even if they were a couple of years later; they were still important, and still needed to be recognized. I am sure that there were a lot of people around the world who also wished to make up these lost moments for the last two years, and that was probably the reason that travel was so crazy this summer.
It wasn’t just the visiting of family and friends that returned to a sense of normalcy this summer. Business was also getting back to the way that it once was. Some considered this a good thing; whereas, others thought that something could have been learned about the way we conduct business from the last couple of years. As a teacher, I am required to take class to keep on top of the latest developments in education, and they have been annoying the last couple of years. I have had to sit in front of a computer, and watch a tiny screen as some trainer babbled on about what I should know. This is not a good form of education. It is easy to get distracted, and all of the teachers I had in this kind of experience, rambled on about nothing for way too long. I get a lot more out of the experience if I show up and have face to face conversations with my colleagues, and interaction with the person running the training. This summer, I was able to enjoy that kind of experience again. During the end of July, I flew to Wisconsin to have some training on English Language Learning with the WIDA Institute. It was a great trip, and I got a lot out of the experience, and am looking forward to more like it.
Though I appreciated the in-person conference, I understand why things have changed for companies all over the world. A lot of money has been spent on office space over the years, and they have learned that this is not necessarily needed. They are beginning to see that their employees will get their work done from their homes, and there is no need for somebody to watch over them to make sure they are doing their work. These companies are starting to recognize that they do not need to spend a lot of money on office space, and have their employees commute into work every day. They can have happy and productive employees and allow them to make their homes their workspace. This rethinking of the way we do things is one of the effects of the last couple of years. Both the old and the new ways have advantages and disadvantages to them, and it is interesting to see how the world makes the changes because of the adjustments that needed to happen the last couple of years.
Of course, as anybody living in the United States over the summer can testify, it was impossible to escape the heat that gripped a lot of the country. It was only a matter of time before I ran into that heatwave in my home state of Colorado. I enjoyed it at first, but of course, heat is always oppressive and I found that spending my time indoors was more comfortable than being outside in the heat. Still, it was nice to make it back home and have the chance to visit with family and friends. The time always seems so short for this, and I try not to fill it up with too many other things that would take up my time.
But of course, you can’t head back to the place where you used to live and that has a part of your life still at it, and not have some business that you need to attend to. For me this time around, it was with my storage unit. It had been getting to be a mess from years of just rummaging through it without me giving much thought to how well I organized it after I had left. The company I was renting from was also raising the price, and it was getting to be a little ridiculous with how much I was paying per month. So I spent a couple of days going through all of the stuff I had left behind, so I could move it to a new storage space that was more reasonably priced. There were moments with it that had a nostalgic feel to it. I was looking at stuff I had not seen in over seven years and it brought back some great memories. Of course, there was a bunch of other stuff that I went through and wondered why I had kept it for so long. When it was all said and done, it was great that I had gone through it all, and my stuff was a little more organized.
It was a great and busy summer, and it was a great time to make up a little bit of what was lost over the last couple of years, and I feel that a lot of people had the same idea with their summer. I was lucky to avoid the heat that many other people had run into on their summers, but in the end, we were all able to form some great memories with the adventures we had. It is back to the grind, and based on the adventures I had, I am ready to take on that challenge to build up to that next time I get to go out and have another adventure. Until then, keep on
John Collings 