One of my biggest pet peeves used to be when people would say to me, “It must be nice to be a teacher, you have summers off!” It made me want to show them my plan book and say, “What do you mean a summer off?! I’m already planning for next year!”
I know we all feel that way, so I want to encourage you with something that I’ve done a lot of thinking about in the last couple of years that’s really helped me.
I used to want to draw a big separating line between my work life and my personal life. I didn’t want to engage in work in my personal life and vice versa. But what I realized is that a lot of teaching – the creativity, looking for resources, even going to conferences and having coffee with colleagues to talk about teaching – all happened during the summer, and is a big part of what I enjoy about teaching!
So while I think we need to have good boundaries between taking home work too much, I do think that summer can be a time for all of us to restore and renew because we’re away from it all, and to think about what you want and need to do to make next year even better.
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