🌿 Your Tuesday Email: Release the Year

Hello Reader!

The year is over. Let it be over.

Somewhere in the last week of school, most educators do something quietly extraordinary.

They hold it together! Woohoo!

For eight, nine, ten months, they've been the person students counted on, the one colleagues leaned on, the professional who kept showing up, through the hard and what felt like impossible days. And in those final hours, they hold the whole thing together one last time.

Then the bell rings. The year ends. And nobody tells you what to do with everything you've been carrying.

The Weight That Doesn't Lift Automatically

Closing a school year isn't like closing a book. You can't just put it on the shelf.

The year lives in every part of your being, from the student you're still thinking about, to the moment you handled poorly, and the goal you set in September that never came fully to life. For most educators, the year follows them out the door and all the way into June.

That's what it means to have done work that actually mattered to you.

Now it’s time for REAL rest and that requires something intentional first: release.

What Release Actually Means

Releasing the year doesn't mean pretending it was fine when it wasn't. It doesn't mean manufacturing gratitude for the hard parts or fast-forwarding through the grief of a year that asked too much.

It means giving the year its honest ending.

That might look like:

• Writing down what this year was for you
• Naming one thing you're proud of that no one else saw or recognized
• Acknowledging one thing that didn't go how you hoped, and letting it be what it was
• Saying goodbye to students in a way that honored what you built together

These aren't productivity tasks. They're emotional completions, and they matter more than we realize, because the year you don't finish consciously becomes the year you carry into the next one.

The Myth of the Clean Break

We tend to talk about summer as if it's a switch. School year on. School year off. Clean break.

But we all know that's not how it works. The first two weeks of summer are often the hangover of a year's worth of sustained giving. The body rests, but the mind keeps running, often replaying, reviewing, second-guessing.

The antidote isn't to push the thoughts away. It's to give them a place to land.

What happened this year deserves acknowledgment because it mattered.

Podcast:

• This week: Ep 112 - Conditions, Not Programs Make a Better Learning Environment Part 1 with Dr. Dan Keller (our Plan Z Leadership Coach!). Adding one more program can feel like the responsible move, until you look up and realize the “support” is undermining the very learning environment you’re trying to improve.
• Next week: Ep 113 - Part 2 with Dan
• Last week: Ep 111 - Making Room for Picture Books with literacy specialist, Sarah Cordova.

Listen to the pod on all the platforms like Apple, Spotify, iHeart Radio and YouTube. Now you can follow us on Instagram.

Resources:

• Greater Good Science Center: "How to Actually Let Go of a Hard Year"​
• Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (on why emotional processing matters for real recovery)
• For fun - The Farmer's Almanac - June​

Reflection

Before you fully step into summer, sit with this:

What does this year deserve to be called — not on a report card, but honestly?

Name it. Write it down. Let it be true.

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Yours,

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P.S. Forward this email to colleagues who you think would enjoy the connection and resources.