The other day I heard someone compare a teacher's summer to a weekend. June is like a Friday-you look forward to all the fun stuff you have planned. July is like a Saturday-you actually get to enjoy all the fun stuff. And then there is August. August is like a Sunday-never long enough, and you spend most of it worrying about all the things you didn't get done on Friday and Saturday.
While I definitely agree with that analogy, August is a little different for me. Don't get me wrong, I totally spend most of the month cursing myself for not doing enough the rest of the summer (This is what a typical Sunday looks like for me too. Procrastinators hate Sundays. Procrastinating teachers hate August. I am both.). In the past couple years as a teacher, August has become a symbol for what I love and hate about teaching. I hate that I have mounds of papers to organize (you know, the ones I shoved into cabinets, desk, and filing drawers on the last day of school). I hate that I lists and lists of things to accomplish before I can feel fully ready for school to start...and only minimal time to finish them. I hate that I feel like school just ended and I barely got time to breathe before it starts back up again.
But August has also become a month of frenetic energy too. Come August 1st, I feel an intense need to revisit all my unit and lesson plans, and rework everything. My mind is racing at 120 miles per hour with ideas of how to change, tweak, scrap, and redesign things so students can be more successful. I scour books, blogs, websites, and educational twitter feeds hoping to find something that will spark an A-Ha! moment. While I hate those lists and lists of things to do, those lists come from the ideas that hope I can implement into my classroom. By the week that school begins, I am exhausted from the speed my mind goes all month long.
As a teacher, I love fall. It really all boils down to fresh starts. I love getting a new crew of 8th graders and seeing how they will grow over the next nine months. I love rearranging my classroom and hanging up new posters or bulletin boards. I love coming up with new community building lessons for the first week of school. I love the blank page that the new school year gives me to try new projects, classroom management techniques, and technology integration. Oh, and I love new school supplies more than a grown woman should love new school supplies.
This year I will also have the added responsibility of being team leader, which both excites me and terrifies me to the point that if I think about it too much, I'd probably make myself sick. On the surface, it's just a label. A staff member designated to lead team meetings and organize field trips. However, to me it's a lot more than that. A team leader sets the tone of that team. If a team leader is anxious and worrisome, the team will be too. If a team leader is fun-loving and unfocused, the team will never accomplish anything. So what happens when the team leader is still a newish teacher, a procrastinator, and tends to have a different standpoint on discipline than the rest of her team? It could be an unmitigated disaster. It could be a overwhelming and stressful. It could be fulfilling learning opportunity.
Teaching is one of the rare professions that allows fresh starts to happen once a year. As frustrating, stressful, and overwhelming last year became, I know that come September 1st things can start anew. I can make different choices that hopefully turn out for the better. I can't guarantee that everything will change, or that I won't make some of the same mistakes I have before, but I appreciate that my job affords me the opportunity of a do-over, per se.
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