Dear colleague,
I've got a feeling that more than a few of us have contemplated some degree of life or work change here in the 2025-26 school year. Whether it's a job or a role or a school or a city or a hobby or a haircut, change starts feeling tempting during these winter months.
Or maybe it's just me. Without fail, each mid-school-year finds me acutely aware of the differential between how much I need/want to write about and how little time I can afford for writing it. This is an annual pain point for me.
Now, I know that some of you think I'm this mythical creature who doesn't eat or sleep, only works and magically “does it all.” That's very humorous to me. If you could follow me around for a few days, you'd see that I live a pretty normal life. I work from 7 to 5 when I can, 7 to 3 when I need to run kids to this or that after school. When I'm not in work mode, I spend my time devoted to avocational pursuits like loving and delighting in my family, reading books, being a nerd, and enjoying people.
This way of life means that there's not a lot of time to work given that I essentially have two careers — writer and teacher. In those 50 or so hours per week, the breakdown has gone something like this:
- 35 hours for teaching and working with students
- 5 or so hours for meetings (teaching or writing-related)
- 5-10 hours for research
- 5-10 hours for writing
- 5-10 hours for the business side of a writing career
And no — that math doesn't add up.
Which is my point. My “secret” for somehow making it all work is that I'm remarkably average in most areas of my work. (That blog link will explain a bit more.) Basically, I satisfice the heck out of most things.
- I do not over-prep my lessons.
- I don't overthink or perfect assignments.
- My feedback on student work is stripped to the minimum, emphasizing speed and actionability at the expense of thoroughness.
- I don't engage in social media to promote my blog.
- I don't perfect my blog articles and tend to batch-produce most of the year's articles during the summer months.
Were it not for the years-long pursuit of fluency in the work that matters most, my class would be a train wreck and my blog would be radio silence most weeks.
All that said — and to finally get to the point of this article, sorry — it's still stressful being a teacher and a writer, and so about this time of year I start pondering crazy things like taking an unpaid sabbatical from teaching and so on. It's the time of year when life changes start to get into my headspace.
For my buddy Chris, who is one of the best math teachers I've ever met, it's usually about this time of year that he starts pondering a career change into engineering. We laugh at each other when we discuss these urges because you can almost chart them on your calendar and plan for them in advance. These thoughts just have a way of showing up.
Whenever my ponderings get too serious, I'll sometimes use a tool called “experience sampling” to help me gain clarity.
How to use experience sampling to see if you actually want or need to make a change
Experience sampling is pretty simple:
- For the next 10 days, set some alarms in your phone: one before school starts, one during lunch or on prep, one sometime after school is done.
- When the alarm goes off, grab your notebook and jot your first-response answers to a few questions:
- If I had to decide right now between the options I'm considering, which would I choose?
- What's a brief (1-10 words) rationale for my choice?
- How am I feeling right now?
You do this for 10 days or so, and by the time you're done, you're able to look back at your notebook and analyze for patterns.
This method has reliably guided me in making the decision to stay in the classroom over the years and helped me gain clarity on why that's important to me. (One time I was even in consideration for the Director of Teaching and Learning position in my district, and this helped me confidently make the decision to bow out.)
I just wanted to share it as it's helped me a lot with big decisions, and I've taught it to our high school daughter as well, to good effect.
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
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