Blog - Teacher Well-Being - Balancing Summer Work and Rest - summer
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Balancing Summer Work and Rest

Summer is an interesting season for teachers. We count down to it all year long, desperate for the break our friends, family, and neighbors envy. While there may be teachers who are able to jump straight into summer, living a carefree life from June through August, we suspect we’re not the only ones who sometimes find it a struggle.

After going full speed ahead for nine months, often working overtime and into holidays and weekends, it can be jarring to just . . . stop. To all of a sudden have no pressing demands, no work looming over our heads, and chunks of time that aren’t pre-planned can feel unsettling. Sometimes we get a couple days into summer and wonder if we’ve forgotten how to act like normal humans.

The pressure to work never entirely goes away. Life’s going to get crazy in the fall: why not spend some time now doing prep work so I’ll have more time to relax during the school year? Why not write that new unit now instead of juggling it with all the other demands that come when school’s in session? That guilty feeling starts to creep in: I have all day to read this book – shouldn’t I put in an hour of work? It’s only an hour, after all.

When you're feeling recharged, spend some of your time in summer doing work for school that makes you feel good and productive.

For some of us, once the exhaustion and stresses of the last school year finally start to ease, our creativity can flow unrestricted again. We remember we like lesson planning. The ideas start coming to us, and we get excited for them to come to life. We start to miss our work bestie. We see a really clever Instagram post from an English teacher we follow. The school supply sale starts at Target, and the thought of a fresh start with newly sharpened pencils and a blank agenda doesn’t sound quite as traumatizing as it did in June.

It’s crucial to find a balance between rest and work. The fact of the matter is we don’t get enough rest during the school year. We drag ourselves to summer utterly exhausted and spent, with nothing left to give, and if we don’t take time to rest, recharge, and become ourselves again, we’ll start the new school year at less than full capacity. We can only do that so many times before burnout becomes inevitable.

It’s no surprise to any educator in 2023 that teachers are more burned out than ever before. The National Education Association conducted a poll in January 2022 that indicates 55% of educators plan to leave the profession early, “90% of members say feeling burned out is a serious problem,” and “91% say that pandemic-related stress is a serious problem for educators.”

We are at the end of our ropes, and not taking time to rest and recover from the demands of the school year is a risk we cannot afford to take, for ourselves, for our families, for our students. In our combined 30+ years of experience, we’ve learned that no matter how much work we do in summer, the school year will still be hard, and more work will arise to fill the space we’ve created.

Take time to rest during the summer. Go to the beach, lie on a blanket, and read a book. You deserve this.

However, there is something alluring about being able to do the most creative part of our jobs when we actually have time, and this isn’t all bad. Maybe there’s a project, like making Kahoots or Blookets for all your vocabulary lessons, that you’ve always wanted to do but never had time for. Maybe there’s a book you’ve been meaning to read or a conference you’ve been meaning to attend, but you can only think about work so much when school is in session. Maybe you’re teaching a new course, and you want to get started on your first unit. These are all good things.

Teaching isn’t just a job for us: we enjoy learning new things, exercising creativity, and dreaming up new ways to engage with students. We care about our jobs, and we want to improve, avoiding last year’s mistakes and setting the new year up for success.

So, find a balance this summer. Get the rest you need. Read a book. Watch a movie. Take your kids to the pool. Sit in the backyard and stare at the trees. Deep clean your kitchen. Bake scones. Go on vacation. Find the things that spark joy, that make you feel like you, that fill your cup. And when you have an hour here and there, jot some ideas down for the new year. Make that Kahoot you’ve been wanting to make. Meet your work bestie for coffee and some brainstorming. Make the most of the time you have, both to be the teacher you want to be and to be the human you deserve to be.

If you’d like to hear us discuss our approaches to working in the summer and tips and tricks for closing out the year so your life is easier in the fall, check out our podcast episode, “Winding Down Your School Year,” and YouTube video.