Let’s Zoom It Out

Dear colleague,

On any given week, teaching can be a tough gig. But during certain segments of the year, the toughness is especially concentrated. The formerly anonymous teacher blogger Kelly Treleaven had a term for one of these concentrated periods of school year difficulty: the Dark Evil Vortex of Late September-October-November (DEVOLSON).

This is what DEVOLSON can be like:

• One day, I feel like I've got it; the next day, like I've lost it; the next, wondering what “it” even is. It's amazing that this job does this to me even after almost two decades. Teaching is a spiritual adventure, a journey through the wilderness, a hike up Angel's Landing in Zion National Park. Every week!
• One morning, I wake up refreshed and ready; the next, exhausted, zombified; and the next, existentially questioning in the shower how I'm going to be able to keep doing this for 33 more weeks.
• I was looking at ​the “name your emotions” pillow​ we have in our living room the other night and chuckling as I realized that I had experienced pretty much all the emotions on that pillow in just the last 72 hours. 😂

If I wasn't writing to teachers, I wouldn't even try saying these things. DEVOLSON is one of those “when you know, you know” type of seasons. If teaching is anything, it's a full buffet of the human experience.

It's kind of funny to me that DEVOLSON still catches me off guard. Like most teachers, in August I have an optimistic sense of what I want to work on during the school year. I have goals, projects, areas of inquiry. But every fall, those bright shiny plans hit DEVOLSON with the schlurp of a boot hitting a mucky spot on the trail.

Yesterday was a schlurpy moment. I sat down after the school day, intent on writing a blog post. Or five.

Buuuuuut I couldn't. The articles I had planned back in the summer to be writing right now…not happening.

Instead of writing, I took a ​nappucino​.

Then a ​walk​.

Then I tried out an AI tool that blew my mind and unsettled me.

And then I went home. Enjoyed the non-work parts of my life. Got some sleep.

So here's my thought for the day, colleague, as we head into our weekends: if you're in the schlurp of DEVOLSON, now's a good time for the zoom out.

The Zoom Out

I printed ​this​ out this morning and doodled on it. It being a Friday, the seventh of my school year, I was thinking about seasons, thinking about what it means to be feeling all those DEVOLSON things, thinking about Oliver Burkeman's ​Four Thousand Weeks​.

There are a lot of weeks in the average human life. But not so many that you can't represent them as bubbles on a page. A week, then, is precious. A school year of weeks is really precious — lots of bubbles. Whenever I'm in a place where I'm wishing a bubble away, I want to realize it, you know?

I get in those places, especially in DEVOLSON. But I don't want to stay in them.

Because according to those doodles of mine:

• I've got less than half of the number of weeks left in my life that an average US male gets.
• I've already lived through more than half of the number of weeks I'll have with my children still being children.
• I've already lived through more than half the number of weeks I'll spend in a full teaching career of thirty years.

Some might find it a morbid exercise — and it could be, I guess. But I don't let it land me there. Instead, where I have it land me is in appreciation.

Today was another tiring day of teaching. It had a lot of those emotions on the pillow, just like yesterday did. But I definitely felt more gratitude, more tranquility, more fulfillment, more acceptance than I did yesterday. Those were the emotional through lines.

I attribute that to the zoom out.

Have a great weekend, colleague,

DSJR