I recently met a teacher who had just finished his first year on the job somewhere in the northeast USA. He had just sat through my session on “Jedi Mind Tricks for Avoiding Burnout,” and he came up to me and said, “I get it, but I still don’t feel any better.” We kept talking, […]
Inner Work
The Work Beneath the Work
One of the reasons we’re at risk of burning ourselves out this year is that there’s a work beneath our work. Here’s what I mean. The work that we’re heading into or in the midst of right now is lesson plans and unit designs and classroom set-ups and photocopies and tech checks and learning names and teaching annotation […]
Realistic Idealism
Perhaps the guiltiest culprit for our burnout each year is not the latest policy from on high, the newest cumbersome teacher eval rubric, or the fact that “this year’s group is a really rough one.” In my experience, these things create challenging circumstances (and many times the challenge lies not in the things but in […]
Re-evolution, not Revolution
[Note from Dave: This is a guest essay by Bill Curtin, Illinois educator and VP of the Illinois Association of Teachers of English. I’ve been in contact with Bill for a year or so regarding the upcoming IATE conference (details here; registration here), and I was struck by the piece that he wrote below. I […]
Carry It Through
The hardest thing about the start of the school year isn’t setting up a classroom management plan or all the other things I talk about in the School Year Starter Kit. The hardest thing is carrying through the things that we set up or talk about during that first week into every week that follows, […]
