Give Yourself the Summer You Need

There Is No Right Way to Spend Summer

By the time the school year ended, I was usually three things at once: exhausted, excited for summer, and already thinking about the next school year.

The exhaustion was obvious. Another year had come and gone, and I had poured everything I had into it. The excitement came from finally having some breathing room. I looked forward to having no alarms before sunrise, lesson plans waiting on the kitchen table or emails demanding immediate attention.

But then there was the third thing.

My mind would immediately begin replaying the year.

I would find myself reflecting on the year, not because things had gone badly, but because I was always thinking about what could come next.

A lesson that worked well might spark three extension ideas. A student project could inspire an entirely different unit. A successful classroom routine would have me wondering how I could make it even stronger the following year.

My classroom was never something I viewed as “finished.” Even after a great year, I was constantly thinking about ways to expand on what was already working. I’d come up with ideas for activities, resources, and different ways to deepen learning and engagement. Ideas seemed to appear everywhere once I finally had time to breathe.

The problem was that many of those ideas never made it very far.

By the time the school year ended, there were still post-planning meetings, end-of-year tasks, checkout procedures, paperwork, and a hundred other responsibilities competing for my attention. I was often too tired to document my thoughts in any meaningful way.

Then summer would happen.

The ideas would fade into the background as life took over. Family time. Vacations. Rest. Projects around the house. The simple joy of having a slower schedule.

By the time August arrived, the new school year came with its own meetings, expectations, deadlines, and demands. Many of those ideas were either forgotten completely or remembered too late to implement well.

If you’re finding yourself in that space right now, give yourself permission to approach summer differently.

Relax.

Rest.

Take care of yourself.

Spend time with the people you love.

Read something that has nothing to do with education.

Sleep in.

Take a walk.

Sit quietly with your thoughts.

If ideas about next year come to you, jot them down somewhere simple. A notebook. A notes app. A voice memo. Don’t feel obligated to turn every thought into a fully developed action plan. Simply capture it and move on.

At the same time, don’t feel guilty if you don’t think about school at all.

Seriously.

Not every educator processes the school year the same way. Some people need reflection immediately. Others need distance before they can look back objectively. Some summers are filled with planning and inspiration. Others are focused entirely on recovery.

All of those approaches are okay.

Give yourself grace.

For me, July was always a difficult month.

June felt full of freedom and possibility. July felt like a countdown. Every calendar page I turned reminded me that the next school year was getting closer. The excitement of summer started giving way to anxiety about returning.

These days, I don’t experience that feeling in quite the same way. One unexpected lesson I’ve learned since leaving the classroom is that not having a traditional summer break isn’t nearly as bad as I once imagined. The rhythms are different, but so are the stresses.

Still, this season of the year brings back a lot of memories and emotions. It reminds me of the years I spent trying to recover from one school year while preparing for the next.

I’ll be sharing more thoughts about summer, reflection, rest, and preparing for what comes next in the days and weeks ahead as I continue processing some of my own experiences.

For now, my encouragement is simple:

Take the summer you need.

Whether that means reflecting, planning, resting, exploring, or doing absolutely nothing related to school, trust yourself enough to know what you need in this season.

You’ve earned that much.

The idea for After Recess grew from many of the same questions and experiences I’ve shared here. If you’d like to learn more about the story behind this space, I invite you to read Why This Space Exists.