The Stress of a New School Year

I realized today that a new school year is quickly approaching.

Seems like that should not have been a surprise, right? Pretty expected that as summer comes to an end, a new year correspondingly approaches (yes, I know that for many of you, summer goes till Labor Day - I have till mid August), and yet, it was a shocker.

I was at a baseball game with teacher friends at the time. We'd been talking about a variety of topics (the delightfulness of pedicures, why that guy a few rows down was wearing such a definitively unattractive shirt, my overuse of the word delightful) when one of my friends mentioned that she was feeling stressed about the new year. She's going to have three and a half preps and is unenthused, especially as she reports back next week and just learned about this yesterday.

And as I sat there and commisserated with her, I suddenly thought, hey. I have a new year starting soon too. I have to build new relationships with kids too. I have to get to know IEPs and figure out differentiation and learn how to work with my school's new admin and prep for a new grade level and find new model texts and figure out my room layout and learn a new software grading system that we're adopting and try to implement a pilot advisory program and reorganize my classroom library and and and and and.

Mild panic attack in the middle of the game, there.

But I worked through it quickly. I think the issue is that I loved last year so much. So so so much. It was such a great year - not to say I couldn't do better in some areas, but it really was delightful and it ended on such a positive note. So I'm a liiiiiiiiiiiittle nervous that this year won't live up to last. Maybe it won't, but it'll definitely have some great pieces to it.

Mostly I'm super excited for next year - since I'm going to 8th grade I'll have some kids I had two years ago, and I loved those guys, so that'll be fun. Plus I'll get to see my kids from last year again and catch up with them, and THAT'LL be fun. I hear good things about our new admin, I'm really excited to work with the other 8th grade Language Arts teacher because she's a rock star, I have a friend who's offered to share some of the model texts she's found with me, I'll almost certainly do cooperative learning pods because that's how I roll....it's all gonna be fine. It'll be busy, and overwhelming, and stressful, and exciting, and awesome. And I believe that.

And I'm going to keep believing that every day until the end of next summer. When it'll start all over again.

(Photo credit to Stephen Edmonds.)