Heidi: This is episode 262 of Teacher Approved.
You're listening to Teacher Approved, the podcast helping
educators elevate what matters and simplify the rest. I'm
Heidi.
Emily: 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: We're so glad you're tuning in today. Let's get to
the show.
Emily: 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: 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: 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.
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: 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: Yep.
Heidi: I find it's not worth it.
Emily: 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: Oh, yeah, don't make this your problem. I got cornered in
a bathroom once, so like people have no chill.
Emily: 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: 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: 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: And if you're anything like Emily and me, your summer
break usually starts with a well-earned collapse on the
couch.
Emily: 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: 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: 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: 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: Yeah, it's not a reward for surviving the year, it's the
thing that determines whether you can keep doing this work.
Heidi: The reason that collapse doesn't help is that real
recovery is active. It's not the same as zoning out.
Emily: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: That's a really specific kind of depletion, and the
recovery for it is also specific. Think quiet activities
and low stimulation environments.
Heidi: 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: 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: 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: It's true, I love a puzzle. I was just puzzling
yesterday.
Heidi: 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: 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: 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: That's so smart, and I've been meaning to do that.
Heidi: 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: 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: We do like our productive relaxation.
Emily: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Or if you're really lucky, a long shower with the
door locked.
Emily: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.
To wrap up the show, we're sharing what we're giving extra
credit to this week. Emily, what gets your extra credit?
Emily: 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: I was thinking the chair had crossed legs.
Emily: 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: Yeah, seems perfect.
Emily: What are you giving extra credit to?
Heidi: 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: 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: 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: Oh no.
Heidi: 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: Well, you could put the dresses on the bottom and layer
on top.
Heidi: 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: 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: 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: Lock up your plastic bin with your girl doll in it. Hey,
it's vintage now.
Heidi: That's true, I could take it on Antiques Roadshow.
Emily: Apparently.
Heidi: 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: And if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a
teacher friend who could also use some support in this summer
season.
Heidi: We hope you enjoyed this episode of Teacher Approved. I'm
Heidi.
Emily: 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: 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: Bye.