Rest
You deserve rest. You deserve to sleep in. You deserve to watch television or the entire Harry Potter movie collection. You deserve to just read if you want to. Or to lay by the pool.
Rest your mind, rest your body, and most importantly rest your emotions. Teaching is an emotional practice. Good teachers care about their students. They care about their learning. They care about their lives. They care about their students’ health and safety. And all that caring is exhausting!
It is no wonder that at the end of the year we feel drained. Physically and emotionally and mentally. We have doled out everything we have to give. For me, by the time state testing comes around, I feel like it doesn’t really matter anymore and I’m in survival mode until the end of the year.
Do Something You Love
Do you have a hobby? I like to quilt, and I know that during the school year I never have enough time to sit down and quilt for long stretches of time. So, if you have a hobby soak up the time you have to do that hobby.
Do you like traveling? Hiking? Camping? Do it! Get out as much as you can. Leaving the house and the cleaning and the laundry (which is a whole other job) can really make you feel like you are on vacation. I don’t know about you, but I never really felt like I was on summer break until I changed the environment I was in. Staying home all summer wasn’t restful for me.
Don’t Check in with the School
Don’t check your email. Nope. Don’t do it. Resist the urge. They have your home phone number, so if they really needed to get in touch with you, they would call you. As a new teacher mentor, I would call my new teachers if I needed to tell them about the August New Teacher training. It was that important. Everything else can wait for the first day of contract time.
Also, resist the urge to go to the school. I know you want to set up or clean or rearrange your classroom. But don’t. You’ll get sucked in. It’s like a black hole. You might only plan to go in and pick up a book you need for planning, but then you will talk to the secretaries or the admin, the janitor, or the neighbor next door (who also shouldn’t be there). Then when you get to your room, you realize your printer is missing and the table you had in the back of the classroom. Or you got a delivery of materials on your desk. So you search and sort and open. Then your 1 hour turns into 3 and when you leave you realize you forgot to pick up the book. Then you end up doing it all over again.
Personal Professional Development
In order to fill our buckets, we also need to be stimulated intellectually. Maybe that is to read some novels or some poetry. Maybe it is watching documentaries. Maybe it means that you finally crack open all of your New Yorker magazines that have piled up.
And maybe it means that you read a professional development book. I like choosing one book each summer to read. I would much rather read one in the summer than one during the school year. Summer gives me space to think and plan and dream. Summer allows me to ruminate on an idea without everyday teaching life, lesson planning, grading, and meetings get in the way of deciding if I agree or if I want to try out something new.
Some of my Favorite Books for English Teachers
- Reading Reconsidered by Doug Lemov
- 180 Days by Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher
- A Novel Approach by Kate Roberts
- The English Teacher’s Companion by Jim Burke
- Text-Dependent Questions by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey
- Write Beside Them by Penny Kittle
- The Writing Revolution by Judith C. Hochman and Natalie Wexler
Books I Want to Read
- The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop by Felicia Rose Chavez
- Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain by Zaretta Hammond
- Project-Based Writing by Liz Prather
I’m sure that I haven’t included everything that you can do to fill your bucket. I don’t have kids, so I don’t have soccer camps or swim lessons. I know that being with your kids in the summer can be an amazing time to be together and it can also be exasperating. Whatever you choose to do this summer, find what works for you to rest and refill your bucket.
Enjoy your time off – you deserve it!
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*Contains affiliate links, so I do make a small commission if you purchase using this link. However, I only include links to the things I love, use in my own class, or books I have in my own classroom library.
