Happy Summer, teachers! You made it. Thank you for all the work you did during the previous school year—we all had triumphs and difficulties and days we questioned our life choices, I’m sure. Of course, we also had days we couldn’t imagine doing anything else. So much of the beauty of this work is its messiness. But we’re all experiencing the cognitive cultural load and carrying the compassion fatigue deep in our bodies that comes with being educators.
Take a minute to breathe in and congratulate yourself on a completed year. It’s summer. You made it.
As teachers, I know we might get some pushback on all this time “off” we have over the summer. Every single late spring someone says to me that it “must be nice to have so much “time off.” I used to try to explain it to them, but now I just smile. I mean, they don’t need me going into what a 185-day contract actually means or how many of us have side hustles in the summer like painting houses or waiting tables or, in my case, writing books and teaching creative writing workshops.
I’ve been teaching since 1997 and, for me, summer is not summer without some sort of happy place to look forward to, somewhere I am going where I can rest and revive (see the poem at the end!). Maybe it’s a trip you have saved and planned for all year, reading on a shady patio, visiting long distance friends, or time outside with your family. A truly happy summer place is the place that nourishes us, that eases some of our tired emotional muscles fatigued by a year of being in education.
Restorative Places
I know that whatever our experience, we all get some time away from our classrooms to repair ourselves. Much of this restorative work has to do with the places we choose to do the repair in. Educational work can often feel like a school year of picking up beautiful, interesting stones and adding them to our pockets throughout the year. Each one is its own unique story but, over the year, we can become weighted down with them. Where do we go to set them down? How do we empty our pockets so that, come Fall, we can begin again?
Take stock of the special places in our lives during summer that rejuvenate and inspire us to keep returning the work we all love during the school year. Try the following exercise to reflect on your happy place.
Prompt: Write a 100-word descriptive piece about a place that nourishes you in the summer. Think in terms of intentional noticing – the sounds, the smells, the tastes, the way it feels to touch and see this place. Reflect on its power to restore your joy, to allow you to rest or reflect.
Here is the one I wrote about Lake Tahoe:
Tahoe Reset |
It starts with a glimpse of blue lake through the pines. It’s windy, the white caps chopping the water. My chest begins to loosen. Walking the short promenade, my ears fill with the sound of the lake rolling against the shore. One of the restaurants cooks something smoky on a grill. Later, I’ll hike through aspen groves under a pale sky. I’ll sit by a pool, sipping lemony iced tea. Looking up from my book, I’ll realize my students’ stories are already blurring, becoming memories. Gratefully, I’ll release the weight of last year. Into the water, the wind, the sunlight. |
Kim Culbertson is the author of 100-Word Stories (co-authored by Grant Faulkner). Improve secondary students' writing skills with 100-word stories, a popular form of flash fiction that teaches kids a wide variety of literary skills and devices. Lessons and writing prompts accompany each mentor text and give you tools to use this instructional method in your writing classroom today.
