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Don’t Let September Steal Your August
Somewhere around the last week of July, something strange begins happening to teachers. The pool floats are still inflated. The tomatoes in the garden are finally doing their thing. You still have sunscreen in your beach bag. And yet… Your brain has quietly wandered back into the school building. It’s arranging desks and reading class…
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The Prosecution Should Rest:How Our Own Thoughts Hijack Our Joy
Let’s play a quick game called Name That Profession. Who said this? “If everyone else would just do their job, mine wouldn’t be so hard.” Need another clue? “I’m over here busting my butt while other people are screwing around.” One more? “People just don’t seem to care about doing a good job.” Who said…
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Your Brain is a Drama Queen (and it’s exhausting): How negativity bias keeps teachers stuck—and what to do about it.
Imagine your brain producing roughly 6,000 thoughts between the moment you wake up and the moment your head hits the pillow that night. One of the more conservative estimates of daily thinking comes from researchers at Queen’s University, who estimated that we experience around 6,000 thoughts each day. The fascinating part isn’t just the number.…
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4 Little Rules That Change the Game
As educators, we spend a lot of time talking about what kids need to be successful. Curriculum matters. Instruction matters. Relationships matter. Interventions matter. All true. And if you stopped a group of teachers in the hallway and asked, “What are the most important life skills we want our students to learn?” I suspect most…
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The Story You’re Telling Yourself About Teaching Matters
Why Pride in Service Will Carry You Further Than Praise Ever Will Teachers are tired. Not just physically tired. Soul tired. The kind of tired that comes from caring deeply about something while simultaneously feeling like what you do is being measured, evaluated, debated, criticized, ranked, and scrutinized from every possible angle. They’re discouraged. Somewhere…
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Why Is It So Hard to “Get It Together” During Summer Break?
A Teacher’s Guide to Couch Paralysis, 17 New Planners, and the Strange Terror of Free Time By the time summer arrives, most teachers are carrying a very specific fantasy. This is the summer. The summer we finally: And yet… Three days into break, many of us are sitting motionless on the couch eating handfuls of…
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You Don’t Have to Crawl to the Finish Line
A Gentle Reminder for Teachers in “Almost Summer” Season There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that shows up around this time of year. The kind where your body walks into school, but your spirit is somewhere face-down on a pontoon boat holding an iced coffee and ignoring emails. The copier jams and you briefly consider…
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Mindset Matters
If thoughts burned calories, most of us would look like marathon runners. We think all day long — about our families, our to-do lists, our students, what we should have said, chances we wish we would have taken, why we’re mad at so and so, and on and on and on . . . But…
The Teacher Restoration Room 