Six Ways To Enhance The End of the School year For your Teacher Life
I know first hand that the end of the school-year is incredibly stressful. Here are some suggestions I have found over my 30 years in the teacher-life some secrets to make the end-of-the-year teaching more enjoyable.
1. Celebrate your student's growth. You know how far your students have progressed, improved, and blossomed more than any test score can show. Celebrate it! Own it! You have impacted your student's lives in ways they will never know. You have forever helped them along their path!
2. Avoid Negativity. Negativity can ruin things for you and for your students. Stay out of the nonsense that goes with the teaching community and look for all of the positivity and beauty that surrounds you. Find those positive forces in your life. Find your marigolds! One bad apple does spoil the whole bunch, baby! It only takes one person to ruin the morale of the entire team. I have seen an entire staff be poisoned by one person who spread toxicity with gossip, negativity, and misguided truths. Avoid it. Stay above it! Treat it as the pandemic as it is.
3. Cut out the busywork. As the end of the school year looms, write down ten things you want to accomplish with your students, calendar them, and keep those things a priority. Don't overload yourself and your students, give them some free exploration opportunities and sit back and be amazed at the learning. If an activity can be done without a worksheet, do it that way! Keeping the learning authentic, fun, and engaging improves behavior at the end of the school year, and makes the time more enjoyable for everyone. Give assignments, prepare center activities, etc that have a clear purpose and outcome expectation. If you cannot come up with good reasoning for the assignment or task, it is probably busy work— nix it! Consider end of the year activities that are both academic and meaningful to your students such as memory-making activities that can fulfill academic content expectations in a different out-of-the-box way. For example, do your students need to write? Take them out to the grass and have them write about what they see is in a square foot of lawn…. have them dig in the hills and write about what they found…. ask them to sit by the road and write about the first thing that drives or walks by…. Ask your students for ideas. That is always where the best ideas lay.
4. Be a clock watcher. Keep yourself on track during the day, stay on task so you can leave at the end of the school day as quickly as you can. Go home and take a walk, drink a beverage, hug your kids, cook some dinner, do a hobby. Do your work and go home! The end of the year is filled with must-do focused "things.” Get them done and then leave with the clock. Need help accomplishing the goal to stay on track and keep focused? Use the Pomodoro technique I have found it so helpful in many areas of my life. Also consider taking a couple weeks off from social media. Have you really stopped to realize how much time you are spending there? Set the screen time on your phone, and you will probably be amazed at those non-present moments.
5. Be kind to yourself. You have worked hard, made a difference in student's lives, and put in the effort. Now is the time to be kind to yourself. Reflect on the good, write a list of ten things you did right this year and reflect on them. Congratulate yourself on those ten accomplishments. Be nice to you! Cut yourself some slack. Being nicer to yourself is an effective way to increase happiness in your life, to become healthier, become more successful, more positive, and to become a better version of yourself. You ARE enough! Celebrate you!
6. Be a positive force. Be the force of happiness. Smile, be gracious, be happy, be kind, be humble, be tolerant, be caring.... You will find as you put yourself in a positive mental place, the happiness will flow to you. Happiness is like jam. It is hard to spread it around without getting it on yourself! Be joyous during the school day, spread that joy by example and with confidence! Becoming a positive force will not only help you be less stressed, it will help you be more productive, allow for clearer thought, increase your creativity, and increase health, happiness, and even life expectancy!
