Why Teacher's Saturday's Look Like This

Why Teachers' Saturdays Look Like This 

If you’ve ever wondered why teachers spend their Saturdays surrounded by piles of exercise books, half-empty coffee cups, laptops, pens, and a mountain of marking instead of strolling through a park or sitting in some cute café, this photo says it all.

People imagine that weekends are when teachers “finally relax”. I wish. Saturdays often become the catch-up day; the invisible day of unpaid labour that no one talks about. While others ease into their morning with a slow breakfast; many teachers are already flipping through notebooks; checking writing tasks; planning next week’s lessons; fixing mistakes; giving personalised feedback; and trying to stay on top of everything school throws at us.

And here’s the truth: it’s not because we don’t want to rest. It’s because we care. Deeply.

Teaching isn’t the kind of job you can leave at the door. Our students’ work follows us home; their progress lives in our heads; their stories stay with us. For every beautifully planned lesson you see in class; there’s an evening or weekend behind it where a teacher sat with a stack of copybooks like the one in the photo; reading every line to make sure each child improves.

Most teachers don’t sit in cosy cafés on Saturdays because they’re too busy doing all the things the public doesn’t see: marking essays, planning next week’s lessons, adapting tasks for different learners, rewriting activities because something didn’t work, preparing assessments, filling in admin that magically “appears” and catching up on the never-ending to-do list.

We do it because Monday morning deserves our best; and so do the kids.

It’s exhausting, yes. It’s also isolating sometimes. You’re sitting there with your coffee going cold, looking at yet another exercise book, thinking, “This is my Saturday… again.” But then you remember the student who finally understood something because of the feedback you gave, or the shy one who wrote their first full paragraph, or the class that surprised you last week. And you keep going.

So if you ever see a teacher with bags under their eyes on a Monday;remember their weekend looked like this photo; not like a beach walk or a brunch date.

And to every teacher spending their Saturday marking: I see you. I’m right there with you. And one day, hopefully, the world will appreciate the hidden work that goes into shaping young minds.