End of the School Year Survival Tips for Teachers
A childhood rhyme tells us all the months except for “September, April, June, and November” (and, of course, that tricky February) are an equal 31 days. But if you’re a teacher, you KNOW that holiday-free October, March, and May are by far the longest months of the year.
If we had to pick a single contender, it would be March.
All the hope and goodwill of a new year (or even a new semester) are long gone. The end of the school year still feels too far away. We’re tired, our students are tired, and AP exams or state testing are looming, forcing us to confront how far behind we’ve fallen.
For us (and we imagine for many of you), March also includes student registration for next year’s classes. The end of the school year is months away, but our administrators are asking us to promote our classes, and anxiety is creeping in: will we be teaching the same courses or starting over with something new? This past weekend, Steph was talking to a former coworker who’s currently living that phase, and over the course of the conversation, Steph could feel her muscles tightening.
On these long days, it’s an utter challenge just to show up, much less be the teachers we strive to be. We sit in our car in the parking lot each morning, wondering how we’ll make it to the end of the school year yet again, but feeling guilty because the end of the school year is still too far away to completely give up on learning and classroom management for the year.
So what do we do? How do we muster up the energy and motivation to make it through the slog to the end of the school year that is March?
Believe it or not, it is possible, and out of sheer desperation, we’ve found ways to get through these long days that make up the stretch before the end of the school year.
3 End of the School Year Mindset Adjustments
We’ve got plenty of practical ideas, but underlying each of them is a series of three essential mindset shifts that will help you through these long months.
1
Aim to do a good job, not an amazing job.
While this is probably good advice the entire year, it’s especially true in March. This is not the time of the year to hold yourself to perfectionist standards.
One of Steph’s assignments in OCD therapy was to intentionally aim for a B-minus, not an A-plus. As we’ve probably all told anxious students before, a B is good. 80% is well over half. And, more likely than not, if we’re the kind of people who need to be given this advice, our 80% is probably many people’s A+.
In the seasons when it feels like a herculean effort just to show up, we have to cut ourselves some slack, or we’re going to feel like constant failures, making us even less motivated to hang in there.
2
Take the month one hour, one task at a time.
March is also not the time to take the long view. Instead of considering the entire 31 days (or even each 5-day week) at once, take the month in much smaller increments. What do you have to do today? In this class period? In this 20-minute chunk? That’s enough. You can pick something else to focus on when that’s finished.
3
Do what you can when you can, and be kind to yourself in the meantime.
Sometimes, you just have to accept that it’s not going to be a big accomplishment day. This was Steph last week (and the inspiration for today’s post). She was tired, she didn’t feel good, and so she just did what she needed to do and found ways to count reading time as work time.
Those days or weeks will pass, and one day you’ll wake up feeling inexplicably motivated to knock a dozen things off your to-do list. Take advantage of those days, and be kind to yourself on the others. The good thing about March is that it’s not May: you still have a few months to go before you’re under the end of the school year time crunch.
Once you’ve made these mindset shifts, there are some strategies you can use in your classroom to maximize the time despite the challenges.
7 Practical End of the School Year Classroom Strategies
1. Plan a film or audio-based unit.
March is a great time of year to work on our two favorite high school standards:
- Grades 9–10: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.7 – Analyze the representation of a subject or a key scene in two different artistic mediums, including what is emphasized or absent in each treatment (e.g., Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus).
- Grades 11–12: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.7 – Analyze multiple interpretations of a story, drama, or poem (e.g., recorded or live production of a play or recorded novel or poetry), evaluating how each version interprets the source text. (Include at least one play by Shakespeare and one play by an American dramatist.)
Teaching Pride and Prejudice? Time to see how the 6-hour BBC miniseries stacks up. Why choose the best film adaptation of Macbeth when your students can decide for themselves? Plays are meant to be watched rather than read anyway.
Why not tackle nonfiction (and those Speaking and Listening standards we all ignore) with a podcast unit? Steph used Serial for an English boot camp this past summer, and the students were super engaged, but thanks to Building Book Love, students still participated in rich critical thinking and writing activities.
We know your students are already begging for more movie days, so why not give it to them?
2. Make building reading stamina your unit focus.
We know there’s a lot to cover in a school year: our students need to develop their writing and literary analysis skills, and each grade has its own set of progressively more advanced content standards to work toward. But in our digital era, when attention spans are shrinking and American reading rates are decreasing, it’s a perfectly valid choice to decide that you and your students are going to settle in with the audio recording of a novel and a simple study guide and just practice focusing for an extended period of time.
This is the approach we took with To Kill a Mockingbird some years in our standard-level classes: instead of tackling a big project or working through lessons on symbolism and characterization, we hit play, passed out coloring sheets, and simply embraced the fact that our students were actually reading a good book.
At a school where you need a content standard on the board for each lesson? We like this one (or its equivalent for whatever grade level you teach): CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.10 – By the end of grade 9, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, in the grades 9-10 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range.)
3. Plan to teach your favorite unit.
March may be a challenging month, but the good thing about it (and other long months like October and May) is that you can get through a unit without being constantly interrupted by a slew of four-day weeks. Don’t get us wrong: we love February, but it always poses problems when calendaring!
Take advantage of the solid chunk of uninterrupted time to teach your favorite unit, one that will make you get out of your car just a little bit faster in the mornings and that you know is a hit with students.
For us, March was Shakespeare month, the perfect time for an Introduction to Shakespeare escape room and stories full of bloody betrayals. Our sophomores worked through Julius Caesar, with the crime report activity we lovingly perfected over the course of 15 years, and our AP Lit seniors took on Macbeth. The good discussions and engaging activities kept us all going, and the lack of interruptions helped our students remember the stories’ twists and turns.
4. Plan a professional development day.
If you’re lucky enough to work in a district that will give Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) or departments pull-out days for grading or planning, schedule those days for March.
We all know that a professional development day, while not quite a day off, feels like a break since we’re out of the classroom, so give yourself a “four-day” week while still getting important things off your plate that you won’t want to do at the end of the school year.
Some good options for March professional development? Grading days to norm as a PLC, Senior Project planning days, days to plan your final unit of the year, or vertical team discussions about student success across the department.
5. Redo your seating chart.
This is such a small thing, but we’ve all had those students who make us dread coming to school or threaten to transform a tolerable day into a dumpster fire. March is not the time to battle your most challenging students. Redo your seating chart so the students who push your buttons are in your periphery. Something about not having them directly in your eyeline every single minute makes a long month like March slightly more bearable.
6. Apply the 20-minute-rule to your most overwhelming task.
We’re big believers in the “you can do anything for 20 minutes” rule, and it has helped us survive many long-slog months.
Is there a task on your to-do list that threatens to send you into a torrential “I can’t do it” sobbing fit? (For us, it was almost always the stack of AP Literature essays we’d been avoiding.) March is the perfect month to apply the 20-minute-rule to it.
At some point each day, set a timer for 20 minutes, work on that dreaded task, and the second the timer goes off, you can stop. You’ll make progress (and get it done eventually), but it will feel much more tolerable. (Bonus points if you do it with a friend: you could frequently find us doing our 20 minutes together in Kate’s classroom.)
7. Set whatever work boundary helps you most.
Teaching, with its wildly unreasonable expectations, is one of those jobs that can bleed into every second of free time you have, and long slog months like March are a great time to practice your boundary-setting skills.
One of the best boundaries to set is a “hard stop” rule, but this will look different depending on your personality, home life, or even the school year (ours definitely changed year to year).
Some years, we forced ourselves to leave campus immediately after the bell. We could take work home and come back to it after dinner, but we need to remove ourselves from the school setting, do a workout, have some family time, or even lay on the couch and scroll mindlessly for a few minutes first.
Other years, we committed to staying at work until 4 or 5, but we were not allowed to bring work home or crack our laptops open once we left. Once we left campus, our day was done.
Either way, we got some work done and got the break we needed.
Finally, it’s important to make sure you’re taking care of yourself in these long months. We’re advocates for this all year long, but it’s especially important in the long months leading up to the end of the school year.
7 Self-Care Strategies to Survive the End of the School Year
1. Plan a ditch day.
We’re sorry. Did we say “ditch day”? We meant “mental health” day.
In one particularly rough school year, Kate’s son declared that we need to have a “Disney Ditch Day.” As OC residents, it was easy enough to take a day off to spend the day at Disneyland (we acknowledge that we’re pretty lucky!), and in addition to providing us something to look forward to, we had a blast that boosted us through a few more days of March.
You have personal days: use them.
These long months are a great time to use some of your unused PTO—whether it’s sick days or personal days, they’re yours, and you earned them—and do something that will bring a little joy into your life.
2. Go to Starbucks on your prep.
By our last few years in the classroom, we were at Starbucks every day, sometimes more than once.
But before the burnout monster got us, we’d go more frequently to Starbucks during our prep periods in these long months. Sometimes a mocha, a flat white, and a couple cake pops were far more helpful than a 50-minute period of grading or planning time.
Not a Starbucks fan? You’re still welcome here—just swap in your preferred coffee (or treat) place within driving distance!
3. Plan your summer vacation so you have something to look forward to.
These long months are the perfect time to plan your summer vacation. If you haven’t already picked a spot and made reservations, now’s the time anyway; even if you have made reservations, it’s getting close enough that you can start planning your activities. This is a great way to have something to look forward to in the evenings and in the months to come.
4. Set aside “me time” each day.
While this is an obvious self-care tenet, we often skip it during the stressful times when we need it most. Make sure you’re carving out time for yourself, whether it’s a few minutes to do a face mask, an hour to watch your favorite TV show, or an evening for dinner or drinks with friends.
And it’s okay if you trend toward mindless activities like phone games and social media scrolling instead of reading the latest National Book Award winner.
5. Work on a non-school goal.
Long months like March are a great time to tackle a personal goal that has nothing to do with work. Whether it’s a workout challenge, that home project you’ve been dreaming about, or a quest to perfect your brownie recipe, having something to think about (and feel accomplished about) will keep you going and remind you to take time for yourself.
6. Store chocolate in your desk.
If you’re trying to eat healthy, it can be dangerous to store treats in your desk all year long. But these long months just might be the time to treat yourself and your PLC to a stash of treats that make the day pass just a little faster.
7. Make time to talk to someone who understands what you’re going through.
One of the most exhausting things about teaching is that no people who aren’t teachers just can’t understand the utter depths of exhaustion we’re experiencing, no matter how compassionate they are.
March is a great time to have a vent session in your teacher bestie’s room after school or a PLC meeting that’s less about planning and more about sharing frustrations.
If you don’t have a teacher bestie at your site (or the politics on your campus are, let’s say, challenging), join a teacher community online. It can be so satisfying to realize that you’re not alone, that other teachers have similar experiences, that you’re not a weirdly terrible teacher, that maybe someone else has it even worse than you do.
The long months that make up the slog to the end of the school year can feel interminable—for us and our students. But they don’t have to be, and a shift in mindset can help us make the most of our time while still holding onto our sanity. Most importantly remember that you are not alone: the months leading up to the end of the school year are hard for all of us, so show up and give each day what you’ve got, acknowledging that this may look different than it does at other times of the year.
If you’d like to hear us chat about these tips, check out Episode 35 of our podcast, Answers May Vary. If you found this encouraging, sign up for our weekly newsletter to have practical tips and friendly advice delivered straight to your inbox each week.
