Crashing Isn’t Resting: The Summer Teacher Mistake to Skip This Year [Episode 262]

Heidi 0:00
This is episode 262 of Teacher Approved.

Heidi 0:06
You’re listening to Teacher Approved, the podcast helping educators elevate what matters and simplify the rest. I’m Heidi.

Emily 0:13
And I’m Emily. We’re the creators behind Second Story Window, where we give research-based and teacher-approved strategies that make teaching less stressful and more effective. You can check out the show notes and resources from each episode at secondstorywindow.net.

Heidi 0:28
We’re so glad you’re tuning in today. Let’s get to the show.

Emily 0:35
Hey there, thanks for joining us today. In today’s episode, we are talking about what real summer recovery looks like, and why crashing on the couch for two weeks isn’t the same thing as resting. Plus, we’ve got a teacher-approved tip for thinking ahead to your digital organization for next year.

Heidi 0:53
But first, let’s start with a try it tomorrow, where we share a quick win that you can try right away. Emily, what’s our suggestion this week?

Emily 1:00
This week, make a plan for what to say when someone wants to talk about school stuff, and you do not. Someone is going to corner you at a barbecue and want to solve their kids’ reading struggles, or someone will try to recruit you for the curriculum committee that they’re starting up, and in that moment you will probably feel caught off guard. And you might say yes to things that you don’t actually want to do, or get pulled into a long conversation that takes up an hour, and you did not want to do that.

Emily 1:30
So make a plan for how you want to handle it. You could come up with a phrase that you want to say, or a plan for how you could change the subject. That would be my go-to, is, figure out a way to transition out of that conversation in a way that feels comfortable for you, but also does not end in you committing to something you don’t want to do or having a conversation you don’t want to have.

Heidi 1:53
Yeah, I’ve noticed this gets really bad at the start of the summer when parents are finally like seeing the trouble signs, and they want to make it your problem. Because they know you are connected to a school, even if you don’t have anything to do with the grade that their kid is in, you must have all the answers. And then I’ve also noticed that this concern really plummets later in the summer. When I was a newer, sweeter, kinder teacher, I would, I would, 100% make this my problem. If someone wanted to talk to me about, like, how their kid was doing, or, you know, some plans for that coming school year, I would dive all the way in, and then they would never, like, follow through, and so I just went up, like, all this time and energy given, like, all of this mental labor to something that the other person just dropped the ball on, so.

Emily 2:45
Yep.

Heidi 2:45
I find it’s not worth it.

Emily 2:47
Yeah, that’s the frustration. Like, I think I’d be more willing to give out that time to help someone if they followed through on it, but we both have people in our lives that repeatedly do this at the beginning of every summer when they’re panicking, and we know from experience that they’re not going to take seriously anything that we suggest, and so it’s just something they’re doing to ease their anxiety, but they’re not going to follow through on it. So, yeah, it’s just too hard to keep putting labor into that. So, now I’m going for much shorter, like, “Oh, you should just try this,” you know, because I know they’re not going to do it. So, give them something short and quick, and then not devote any more of my time to it.

Heidi 3:19
Oh, yeah, don’t make this your problem. I got cornered in a bathroom once, so like people have no chill.

Emily 3:24
Man. Well, if you like this idea for avoiding awkwardness or mental labor you don’t want to do, would you take a second and give us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify?

Heidi 3:39
So, how was June treating everyone? A lot of you are out already, but we’ve got a few stalwarts still in the trenches. So, let’s talk about what those early days of break might look like.

Emily 3:51
In last week’s episode, we gave you a framework for your first seven days of summer, nothing rigid, just a bit of a shape that you could add to each day if you want to. So go back and check out episode 260 if you missed that one, but let’s zoom out now and look at the bigger picture of summer recovery.

Heidi 4:08
And if you’re anything like Emily and me, your summer break usually starts with a well-earned collapse on the couch.

Emily 4:15
But then somehow you’re three weeks into summer and feeling more tired than you were the day school ended, for some reason. I don’t understand why it works that way.

Heidi 4:24
Well, it happens because it turns out that crashing is not recovering, and most of us have spent years confusing the two. Think about how a hard school year ends, your nervous system is fried, and then when summer finally hits, the natural response is to do absolutely nothing for as long as possible.

Emily 4:45
There’s nothing wrong with keeping things low key, especially at the start of summer. Sometimes you really do need to lie horizontal for a while. That isn’t the problem. The problem is when lying horizontal becomes the entire recovery strategy.

Heidi 4:59
And it’s a problem because that is not actually rest, it’s collapse, and collapse and rest are not the same thing. People don’t burn out from working hard, they burn out from never recovering, which means that recovery is not optional.

Emily 5:13
Yeah, it’s not a reward for surviving the year, it’s the thing that determines whether you can keep doing this work.

Heidi 5:20
The reason that collapse doesn’t help is that real recovery is active. It’s not the same as zoning out.

Emily 5:26
Now, zoning out feels like grass because it is the opposite of work, but it doesn’t actually restore you. Active recovery means doing things to refill what got drained.

Heidi 5:37
This is the trap I fell into pretty much every summer. I collapsed like all my bones had melted, and it was me and the couch for weeks, because I don’t have kids, I could do that, and it was lovely. But as I started getting a bit of energy back, I took that as my go sign. If I could string two thoughts together, that meant it was time to dive back into prep. I had color-coded to-do lists decorated with floral clip art, of course, because it was summer, and I went full throttle. Unpaid hours on the computer and in the work group, just all of it. I knew how hard the school year would be, and it felt like if I didn’t solve every problem in the summer, I wouldn’t be able to deal with it once I was in the thick of teaching again.

Emily 6:23
Yeah. And to be honest, some of the prep was fun. Some personalities like ours enjoy prep. We did enjoy having school projects and getting to work on our classrooms together. That is one of my favorite memories, but it’s true that a lot of our prep was driven by panic.

Heidi 6:40
Definitely. And because we didn’t have a way to identify which tasks were most valuable, everything felt equally urgent, which is how two days before school started, I did have my writing lessons planned for the year, but my desks were still in a heap in the middle of the room. Ugh, my stomach is literally in knots just thinking about it.

Emily 7:02
Yeah, because we didn’t have a system for determining what deserved our energy, and we didn’t understand why recovery was needed. We just tried to do it all, which is how we would start the year already drained.

Heidi 7:15
If you aren’t careful, it’s easy to spend your whole break doing summer wrong in two completely different directions. There’s the over collapse and the over prep.

Emily 7:24
And if you’re an overachiever, maybe you do both, but those two responses have the same underlying issue. There’s no framework for what’s actually needed, so everything feels equally important or equally optional. You end up reactive instead of intentional.

Heidi 7:38
So that is where our summer framework comes in, we call it recovery and readiness. It gives you four different lenses to look at recovery and guide you to set gentle, prioritized boundaries around work.

Emily 7:50
As we mentioned earlier, recovery is active, but that doesn’t have to mean training for a marathon active, unless that’s your jam.

Heidi 7:57
And if it is, more power to you. We will be cheering you on from our air-conditioned houses. But we just mean that recovery has to have a direction to be beneficial. So, we have split it into four different types, and the first type of recovery is to relax.

Emily 8:13
And this might be where your couch collapse comes into play. Relaxing is about slowing your nervous system. This is what you need when you’ve been operating in overstimulated chaos for 10 months straight.

Heidi 8:24
You probably know if you need this type of recovery, the signs are pretty clear. You’re down to your last nerve, everything feels heavy, you can’t sit still, but you also can’t focus. You may even feel anxious trying to rest, because your brain just is not used to working in that mode.

Emily 8:40
That’s a really specific kind of depletion, and the recovery for it is also specific. Think quiet activities and low stimulation environments.

Heidi 8:49
Just watch out for the massive pitfall that claims us all now and then. Screen time. Most of us default to TV or our phones, or both, when we need to relax. Though that feels like low stimulation, it’s actually keeping your nervous system activated. Your brain is still processing input. It’s just a different kind of input.

Emily 9:10
True relaxation means you need some time to unplug. You don’t have to give up your phone entirely, but try to tame the flood of constant content.

Heidi 9:19
And this is a place where Emily and I have landed in very different spots. Emily’s go-to for relaxing is jigsaw puzzles.

Emily 9:26
It’s true, I love a puzzle. I was just puzzling yesterday.

Heidi 9:30
It just cracks me up so much, because puzzles are unlike anything Emily’s ever been into before. I, it feels to me like it just came out of nowhere.

Emily 9:39
Honestly, I don’t even know where it came from, other than I, I discovered I enjoy it at Christmas time, like just doing a little Christmassy puzzle. But then I realized, like, oh, I can do these at any time of the year, and I just like having something available to walk by and be like, oh, I’m gonna sit down and do this for a little while, and sometimes get really into and break my back, you know, spending hours hunched over a puzzle, because you’re just so into it. I just like that you’re working towards a goal, the finished puzzle, and so you get that satisfaction of having completed something, and it’s so easy to relax while you’re doing that. So that’s when I love to listen to a book or music, or sometimes my kids do it with me, and we just talk. Like, it is just a way, it is just something that makes me feel like I am checked out from the normal stuff that’s occupying my brain.

Heidi 10:31
Yeah, that makes sense. A nice way to make your time feel different and more meaningful. I, on the other hand, have a phone problem. I’ve not even gonna pretend I don’t, and when I am tired, I default to scrolling, which is the exact thing we said doesn’t work for relax. So I have been trying to find ways around that, and one thing I did that I know I’ve mentioned here before, but this has been so helpful, is to make a second Instagram account. And I only follow calming content, things like baking bread videos, calligraphy, garden accounts, no news, nothing political or stressful. I don’t even want posts that show faces, so that when I just want to scroll, I can scroll on that account and it actually does feel like low stimulation.

Emily 11:16
That’s so smart, and I’ve been meaning to do that.

Heidi 11:18
Yeah, well, maybe summer’s your moment. But you know it is still on the phone, so lately I’ve been trying to branch out into more tech-free options. My current fave is Sticker by Number Books. It’s kind of like a puzzle, but I don’t have to think about it as hard. And Emily and our mom got me a fun new one for my birthday. I like that it’s just low effort, and when I’m done, I don’t have any like artwork that I have to find a place for. I can just recycle it. It’s done. It’s out of my hair, no clutter.

Emily 11:50
Well, it’s a lot like a puzzle where you have a little end goal that gives you a little hit of like, oh, I got something done, but then you can just move on from it.

Heidi 11:58
We do like our productive relaxation.

Emily 12:02
Yeah, and something like this really does check every relax box. So, the broader point is your version of relax might not look like someone else’s. The test isn’t whether it looks restful from the outside. The test is whether your nervous system actually settles.

Heidi 12:16
After relax. The second R of our summer recovery is refresh. This is about rediscovering the parts of yourself outside of teaching. This is the time to connect with old hobbies, new interests, and spend time with friends that you don’t get to see during the school year.

Emily 12:31
You’ll know you need to refresh when someone asks you what you do for fun, and you genuinely can’t think of any answer, or when you realize you haven’t read anything that isn’t a children’s book in months.

Heidi 12:42
Now, the pitfall with refresh is that it gets confused with self-care in the bath bomb and face mask sense, and of course, those things are nice, but they don’t necessarily do the identity work. You can have a perfectly nice spa day and still come out the other end wondering who you are.

Emily 13:00
Yeah, refresh is a deeper kind of restoration than that, but you also may need our third R, which is refocus. Lean on this when the school year was so all consuming that everything else fell apart. Maybe your house is a disaster, and all your routines have flown out the window.

Heidi 13:18
This one shows up as a low-grade anxious feeling about how disorganized everything is. Maybe you can’t relax because the clutter is bothering you, or you keep thinking you need a reset, but you feel too overwhelmed to start.

Emily 13:31
When something feels too big, it’s best to make it smaller. Instead of reorganizing your kitchen. Start by cleaning out the silverware drawer or setting up a dishwashing schedule. Think gentle ordering, not a productivity binge. You need just enough structure that things feel manageable again.

Heidi 13:48
And the pitfall here is huge. Refocus can flip into the productivity trap if you’re not careful. You start with, I’ll just reorganize my closet, and three days later you’re in a bigger mess than when you started.

Emily 14:01
Yes, that is the classic MPRS, the mid-project regret syndrome. I know it well. It’s that thing where you decide to clean out a closet and organize your cabinets, and so you pull everything out, and then you look around and you’re like, I don’t want to do this anymore. I’ve lost steam, but now I’ve made it so much worse, and I have nothing left to get me to finish this task.

Heidi 14:22
Oh, yeah, or you take everything out of your closet, and then you can’t get to bed at night because it’s covered in your clothes, but the last thing you want to do is spend three hours putting them all back.

Emily 14:31
Yeah, or all your pots and pans are balanced on the kitchen island, and now you’re more stressed than you were before you started, because at least you could get to the microwave before.

Heidi 14:42
So if refocus is your R, the rule is start small, smaller than feels worth it, one drawer, one shelf. Finish the small thing before you move on to anything bigger.

Emily 14:54
And that brings us to our fourth R, which is recharge. This is the fun one, because it’s about rebuilding energy. This is what you need when nothing sounds fun, nothing sounds bad, you just feel kind of beige.

Heidi 15:07
The signs of recharge depletion are sneaky because they don’t look like exhaustion. You have time off, but you still don’t have any get up and go. Even sleep doesn’t seem to help. Maybe you’re physically rested, but mentally empty.

Emily 15:20
The recovery for recharge is doing things that bring you alive, which is different for everybody. For some people, that’s hiking. For others, it’s a really good concert. For some, it’s a quiet morning with coffee or a book that’s so good you stay up late finishing it.

Heidi 15:35
And recharging could mean doing schoolwork, but only if school projects are enjoyable for you. I’m someone who does get a genuine thrill out of planning a new unit. I love that stuff. It’s like a drug.

Emily 15:47
Oh yeah, I mean, doing those big projects we used to do in the summer was very thrilling. I still think there is a place for that in your summer if you get that kind of excitement and thrill and motivation as well. But you do need to be so careful that you don’t let that enthusiasm become a fixation. The pitfall here is confusing doing what lights me up with doing all the things.

Heidi 16:10
And if you are going to open the door to school tasks, boundaries are so important. Limit yourself to only prepping the things you really enjoy and the things that are absolutely essential, and hopefully those things overlap, but I found that they often don’t.

Emily 16:24
That means you need a system for strategizing your back to school readiness, so you don’t land in burnout before August. We’ve got two things to help you with that. First, later this week we are airing one of our Can’t Miss Classic episodes, all about how to set work boundaries to protect your recovery while still letting you get your prep done.

Heidi 16:43
And our second help is this month’s Teacher Approved Club focus. We’ve got a bonus training to help you design the type of summer that you need for recovery and readiness, and we have a resource that I’m so excited about. We’re calling this our Tired Teacher Summer Planner.

Emily 16:59
Ah, it’s so good. It is jam packed with goodies. It takes you step by step through identifying which of your 4 Rs you need most this summer, and then mapping out what that actually looks like for you specifically.

Heidi 17:12
And that way you’re going to walk away with a personalized recovery plan instead of just a generic one. Maybe this year was brutal and you need to lean really hard on relax, or maybe you’re feeling like your life is falling apart, and you need some guidance around refocusing your routines. Whatever you need, we can help you find it.

Emily 17:30
There’s a link in the show notes if you want to join us in the club, that way you get access to this month’s summer resources, plus all our other amazing fun club bonuses, and we’ve got some really fun things going on with the club this summer.

Heidi 17:45
But if you need some place to start right away, ask yourself a couple questions. First, which of these four descriptions made me feel, yeah, that’s me. Sometimes the answer is just immediate.

Emily 17:56
And the second question is, imagine yourself two weeks into an unstructured summer. Picture the version of wasted time that would bother you most. From some teachers, if what you want to avoid is two weeks of scrolling your phone, think about what relaxation looks like without screen time. If you hate the thought of still feeling like a stranger to yourself two weeks into the break, then that’s a sign you need a refresh.

Heidi 18:20
If the version that haunts you is your house still being a wreck and your time feeling scattered, then you need some refocus, and if it’s nothing sounding fun and not being able to get motivated, then you probably need a recharge. The version of failure you’re most afraid of is often the version of recovery you most need.

Emily 18:37
And if you feel like you need a mix of Rs, that’s totally normal. Refresh might be calling to you, but you likely need relax first before you even attempt to reconnect with life.

Heidi 18:47
Yeah, if you are so on edge that you can’t sit still, you’re not going to be able to settle into a hobby that you used to love. Your nervous system has to come down before the deeper restoration work can actually happen.

Emily 18:59
So, a summer plan might start with a week or two of pure relaxation, and then transition into refresh once you’ve actually settled, or you might need to refocus first, because the chaos around you is keeping you from being able to rest at all.

Heidi 19:12
Another thing to keep in mind is that your circumstances might force a particular form of recovery. For example, if you have small kids at home relaxing in the quiet low stimulation sense is just not happening, you were probably laughing when we were even mentioning it. Your house is loud and your downtime is constantly interrupted.

Emily 19:31
Which is ironic, because we just had to pause because my child just came in to interrupt me while we were recording this. But in that case, relax has to look different. It might be a quiet 10 minutes on the porch before everyone wakes up, or listening to audio books while folding laundry.

Heidi 19:48
Or if you’re really lucky, a long shower with the door locked.

Emily 19:51
But maybe don’t get your hopes up on that one. And it’s the same with the other forms of recovery. If your version of an identity restoring refresh is a girls’ weekend away, and that’s not on the cards this summer, find a smaller version. Maybe you schedule coffee with one friend, or you pick up a hobby you can do in 20 minutes between dinner and bedtime.

Heidi 20:10
You know, like a sticker by number book. The framework doesn’t care about the scale of the activity, it cares about whether you’re hitting the right kind of restoration for what’s actually depleted. A teacher with small kids doing 20 minutes of journaling a week is doing more genuine refresh than a teacher with all the time in the world who’s just filling time.

Emily 20:30
So, think about the type of recovery you need to start with. Do you need relax, refresh, refocus, or recharge? And then give yourself permission to do it.

Heidi 20:39
If the little critic in your head starts trying to tell you that you’re not doing enough, remind yourself that recovery is not selfish, it isn’t lazy, and it is definitely not something you have to earn. It’s the thing that lets you keep showing up. Without it, you’re not bringing your full self to your students next year, you’re bringing the depleted version, and those kids deserve the full version of you.

Emily 21:02
Now as lovely as the thought of summer recovery is, wouldn’t it be even lovelier to get to your summer break and not need recovery at all? Wouldn’t it be great if the school year didn’t drain you so much that you’re left deciding, do I need two weeks or three weeks of recuperating on the couch?

Heidi 21:20
And that is why we wrote our book, Structure and Spark. The whole premise is that learning to work with the rhythms of each season, instead of fighting them, is the actual antidote to burnout.

Emily 21:31
What you’re recovering from right now isn’t a hard week or a tough class, it’s the slow accumulation of a year spent pushing through every season the same way. Our hope with this book is to help you not get so burned out next year that you need a long recovery to begin with.

Heidi 21:47
Prevention is always easier than remediation. When you can work with the seasons all year, knowing when to add things and when to subtract them, you don’t end up in June running on fumes.

Emily 21:57
Structure and Spark is available for pre-order now. The link is in the show notes. If you want to take a look and support us with your preorder.

Emily 22:06
Now for our teacher approved tip of the week, where we share an actionable tip to help you elevate what matters and simplify the rest. This week’s teacher approved tip is to start thinking about your digital organization for next year.

Heidi 22:19
And we are saying start thinking on purpose. This is not an assignment. Don’t go into overdrive yet. This is a low-stakes thinking exercise that you can do while you’re driving or scrolling your phone. You just need to turn over a few questions in your head. First, what worked well with your digital files this year? Second, what were the headaches? And third, what can you do to prevent those headaches going forward?

Emily 22:41
For some teachers, the answer is a more nested file system, something that moves from term to month to unit to week to lesson. For others, the answer is fewer folders and a better naming convention, or actually using the search function instead of clicking through 10 levels of folders.

Heidi 23:00
Like with most parts of teaching, the right answer is really individual. There’s no universally best digital organization; there’s just the one that works for the way that your brain finds things.

Emily 23:11
But if you find yourself ready to do a small task alongside this thinking, set up the folders now. You don’t need to start sorting files into them yet; that can wait.

Heidi 23:21
Just think, how happy future you will be when you can find the writing unit that you taught last September on the first try. That is the version of you we’re trying to set up.

Heidi 23:31
To wrap up the show, we’re sharing what we’re giving extra credit to this week. Emily, what gets your extra credit?

Emily 23:36
I’m giving extra credit to a cross-legged chair. Okay, so my daughters needed office chairs to go with their desks, and they wanted something comfy, and I discovered this cross-legged chair, which is basically it’s just super wide, so you can sit crisscross applesauce.

Heidi 23:54
I was thinking the chair had crossed legs.

Emily 23:56
No the chair’s legs are just normal. Your legs are cross-legged, but I’m calling it cross-legged because that’s what the search term is. It’s definitely not crisscross applesauce chair if you’re searching Google. So, I will put a link to this in the show notes, but I would have loved a chair like this when I was a teenager. It’s just comfy and wide, and it looks cute in their rooms, so I will put a link in the show notes.

Heidi 24:23
Yeah, seems perfect.

Emily 24:24
What are you giving extra credit to?

Heidi 24:25
Okay, well, my extra credit goes to a random storage box that I found on Amazon, and I’m only sharing it because it solved a niche problem that I didn’t find anyone mentioning online. So I’m going to share this in case you also have this problem. So I recently had to take possession of my 1988 Samantha doll that had been in my parents’ basement, and her original box is long gone. But she’s now in like a banker box, which is fine, but it has like the holes in the side, and when I see holes, I think spiders, so I didn’t, I wanted something completely enclosed. And given the popularity of American Girl dolls, I thought it would be easy to find a storage box that was made for them. Now, maybe there’s a whole industry out there, and I was just looking in the wrong place, but I could not find anything.

Emily 25:11
No, I have had the same problem. I have all my Molly stuff just like in a big plastic bin, but then it’s just like all in there together, and I have searched for something and not found it, so tell me what you found.

Heidi 25:22
Well, this is all everything is in there, but it all fits. So, I ordered a bin that was 18 inches, because that’s how tall the doll is. But when it came, like, the width of the box was huge. I know the measurements were on there, but somehow I just didn’t compute. And like, I only have a few dresses for Samantha, so I don’t have a bunch of her accessories, but I had her little doll pram. I wonder where that is.

Emily 25:45
Oh no.

Heidi 25:46
Anyway, I decided to get a box that’s 15 inches and gamble, and it worked out perfectly. So she fits if I put her in on a diagonal, and then there’s plenty of room I could just layer all of her dresses on top of her. Poor Samantha.

Emily 26:00
Well, you could put the dresses on the bottom and layer on top.

Heidi 26:02
I guess I could do that as well. There is nothing particularly special about this bin. I think any 15 inch box would work, but I will put a link in the show notes in case you want some direction for your own bin search.

Emily 26:15
Well, I like that it’s a little more snug. I mean, that’s part of what I don’t like about the big tub I have now that has all her stuff in it, because it can just kind of roll all around in there, and I want the doll to be a little more protected, because her limbs are getting loose.

Heidi 26:28
Oh dear, yeah, this is all just well contained, it fit on the top shelf of my closet for some future day, and then all, like it’s all sealed up, so there aren’t any holes on the side for handles. It actually came with a little tiny padlock that I’m not even gonna bother to use.

Emily 26:44
Lock up your plastic bin with your girl doll in it. Hey, it’s vintage now.

Heidi 26:49
That’s true, I could take it on Antiques Roadshow.

Emily 26:52
Apparently.

Heidi 26:55
Well, that is it for today’s episode. Remember, crashing is not recovering. Figure out which R you need most this summer, and let that be your recovery plan.

Emily 27:04
And if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a teacher friend who could also use some support in this summer season.

Heidi 27:12
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Teacher Approved. I’m Heidi.

Emily 27:16
And I’m Emily. Thank you for listening. Be sure to follow or subscribe in your podcast app so that you never miss an episode.

Heidi 27:23
You can connect with us and other teachers in the Teacher Approved Facebook group. We’ll see you here next week. Bye for now.

Emily 27:30
Bye.