I’ve Had Some Terrible Summers

…And this isn’t one of them

You wouldn’t think summer is a stressful time for a teacher, and I’m not looking for anyone to feel sorry for me for anything. But, I can tell you I’ve had some summers that I really regretted how I spent my time.

Some of that was out of my hands. I’ve spent time recovering from things. You can’t help when it’s a health-related thing (specific injuries or maladies I won’t recount, that happened to overlap with the summer). But, and I’m serious about this: summer is always health-related. Which is why you should do it right.

I can’t speak for others who live in similar climates, nor can I speak for others in similar professions. I can’t speak for others who have similar mental, emotional, intellectual, and even spiritual needs. And we all have health to maintain, whether we do it or not. And I can’t speak for you, nor for anyone who experiences the combination of all of those things I listed.

But

Speaking for myself, you already know at least one significant family development that has made this summer memorable. But having a good summer, for me, must be more about what I do than what happens around me. And, as my brother-in-law (who had gone through it before) pointed out at the wedding, my job on the day was limited. So what have I done to make this summer matter more to me?

I record it here to help in the future. Aim to dive into significant experiences before August 1. I can’t tell you what a significant experience is for you. For me:

• Get some place in or outside the house set up for reading/relaxation/meditation, and spend time there. This could just be sitting on the porch.
• Get the pool ready.
• Have a reading goal.
• Plan to mostly avoid social media.
• Engage in an effort to organize part of the house, starting with purging unneeded items.
• Address diet and fitness concerns while you have the time. (e.g. plan meals, adjust workout routines, consider sustainability).
• Relax.
• Aggressively update to-do list while external issues are not being dropped on you on a daily basis.
• Address interpersonal relationships as needed. I know that’s dry-sounding, but it simply is a general way to say that, depending on who you’re talking about, there are different things you should want to do with different people that will strengthen your relationships.
• Monitor these activities for balance. Don’t lean to far into any one.

While I can continue to do this after August 1, the reality of the impending school year is already messing with my brain chemistry. And there are legitimate work-related needs no matter how much we want to pretend that summers are “off” for educators.

I know a lot of educators, and I can say that most of them (even when encouraged) don’t take all that time “off.” Just like they don’t really take weekends off. If you know counterexamples or are one, congratulations. I won’t go into why this is impossible, IMHO, for a professional educator. I’m not interested in debating work/life balance, or what you have become accustomed to. Coming from the academic world, the summer has always been a time to play catch up on education-related obligations. Which often means a more intellectually busy time. I’ve never been fully in that, as I’ve never been a full-time professor at a research university. But that’s the culture.

The luxury of the summer is growth. So, if you want a definition of a bad summer, it would be a summer of no measurable or perceived growth in any area.

Here’s a story

In my first year as a teacher, I learned of an opportunity for teachers to receive a grant that was intended to be used for travel. A teacher in our art department gave a presentation on it, and it had been very rewarding for her. The grant required you to report back on the growth you experienced as a result of your travel. This precisely embodied my understanding of a summer activity for an educator. Better still, you could write a grant for a group to travel together for a common purpose. So I wrote a grant for the three teachers directly involved with building a CS program at our school to travel together to the Computer Science Teachers Association conference over the summer. I think it was in DC.

As excited as I was, and as strong as I thought my proposal was, it was rejected because I didn’t qualify for the grant. I missed the fine print that specified you had to be a teacher for three years before they’d take that risk on you. I get it. And that’s not a mistake I would normally make, but maybe those of you familiar with teaching will understand what your mental state is like in your first year of teaching. I was keen to hit the ground running and prove that I could write grants that transformed our teaching practice. The system told me to cool my jets.

By the way, the rejection was ultimately inconsequential. I wrote my proposal in 2019 for travel over the summer of 2020. My first year of teaching was the year we shut the building down and had to maintain contact with our students via other means. That was a bad summer. For a lot of people.

As a COVID-cautious person relative to the general population, I’ve never gotten to the point where I feel comfortable planning travel for my colleagues. I haven’t flown to a conference since. In the interim, my colleagues moved on, out of the district. Having a good summer again meant, in part, adjusting to some pretty impactful changes in external reality. In addition to the obvious ones.

Advice to my future self, and anyone else listening: what’s going on around you can’t be controlled. That’s not why you should have a good or bad summer. Maybe you can’t overcome everything. But maybe you can set the bar at growth on your own terms. Do that.