🌿 Your Tuesday Email: Renew Your Rest

Hello Reader!

Rest is not a reward for finishing. It's part of how you finish well.

There's a quiet lie that runs underneath the end of the school year, and most educators believe it without ever saying it out loud.

The lie goes like this: rest comes after.

After the final exam. After the last field trip. After grades are submitted. After the year is officially over. Only then do you get to exhale.

But waiting until late May or June to rest means arriving in June with nothing left. And arriving depleted isn't a finish, it's a collapse. Relatable, isn't it? I remember the weeks it would take me to recover in the summer. By week 4, I started to feel rested,

Rest Isn't What You Think It Is

When educators hear "rest," most picture sleep or a beach or a week with no obligations. That kind of rest matters, and you do deserve it. But it isn't the only kind.

Rest for educators in the final stretch of a school year looks different:

• A lunch break you actually take and don't spend grading
• A commute where the podcast stays off and the silence is allowed to be quiet
• A weekend morning that doesn't begin with your school email
• A single evening where you are fully off the clock, and you let yourself believe it

These aren't luxuries. They're the micro-recoveries that make showing up on Monday sustainable.

Why This Is Especially Hard in April and May

The final stretch is uniquely difficult because urgency feels real. There are deadlines. There are students who need you. The to-do list isn't imaginary.

But urgency is not the same as emergency. And the inability to distinguish between the two is one of the most exhausting things about working in schools.

Not every item on your list needs to be finished today. Some of them can wait. Some of them don't matter as much as you've convinced yourself they do. And some of them were never yours to carry in the first place.

Rest ... real rest, even small rest ... creates the space to tell the difference.

Podcast:

• This week: Episode 106 - The TPO Meeting Fix. Meetings can quietly take over a school week and still leave everyone feeling behind. We bring back communication expert and author Chris Fenning for a practical conversation about effective meetings in education and why so many faculty meetings feel draining long before they start. If you’ve ever walked into a Monday meeting expecting one thing and gotten a last-minute surprise plus a pile of follow-up tasks, you already know the cost: stress, confusion, and less time for students. View the video here.
• Next week: Teacher Retention with co-authors, Jessica Holloway and Carrie Bishop
• Last week: Episode 105 - Grammar That Sticks with author, Patty McGee.

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

Resources:

• 📘 Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach — On identity, integrity, and why who you are matters more than what you know
• 📝 Harvard GSE: "What Research Says About Teacher Flourishing at Year's End"

Reflection

Ask yourself this week: What would I do with one hour that belonged entirely to me - no productivity, no planning, no catching up?

Then do it. That's not avoidance. That's training yourself to finish well.

Yours,

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