What December Looks Like in Many Schools
What December Looks Like in Many Schools
You are still catching your breath from report cards and parent conferences at the end of November. If you were lucky, your principal may have planned a professional development day right after conferences (nothing like learning the morning after one of those nights). Or maybe you were “gifted” a half day to write report cards, so you didn’t have to pull an all-nighter right before they were due. Thank goodness all that craziness is over so you can limp into the Winter Break. Haha. Not so quick. We have to celebrate Christmas with a school wide concert the last week before the break! Let’s mess up our daily routines with lots of school and grade-wide rehearsals and increasingly dysregulate a bunch of dysregulated students and staff (my apologies to music teachers everywhere).
The good news? Decembers usually only has three weeks of classes. And if you teach in a high school, life is easy breezy. Report cards are done and volleyball season is over. You are deep into the your content area and counting the days until the break. But wait. You realize that school doesn’t resume until a week into January. Really, you are only half way through what you need to cover this semester. You still have 8 units left. Panic!
Oh, and the bad news? In all your free time in those three weeks, you have to plan for all the joy that the holiday season brings: shopping for gifts, preparing for a house full of dinner guests and ensuring each set of in-laws get the same amount of family time.
So what to do? In a month where there is really not time to catch your breath, you need to take some time to catch your breath. We all say that we will grit our teeth, bear through it and rest up after Christmas. And what happens? We bear through it and then end up in bed for the rest of the break because we are now sick (getting better just in time to go back to school in January!) We need to set boundaries. Easy to say but hard to do. Think about ways where you can roll back a few of your responsibilities. At work and at home. Don’t check work email unless you are at work. Go out for lunch a few times in those last few weeks. Modify your holiday celebration plans. Catch your breath.
You’ve got this.
Here is a link to help make the holidays a little less stressful: