“It must be nice to have the whole summer off.” Every educator has heard this. People envy the lives of leisure they imagine us having. I wonder whether I should let them hold onto the fantasy or if I should explain why their vision of a teacher’s life is so wrong.
Summer for teachers and faculty does not remotely resemble the lifestyles of the rich and famous. It is more like shore leave, the time granted to professional sailors after they’ve spent months sleeping, eating, and working in close quarters, often under conditions of extreme pressure.
For K-12 teachers, summer is about physical and psychological recovery from the juggernaut of the school year: the low pay, crowded classrooms, under-resourced schools, hostile parents, constant scrutiny by the public and government officials, and rapidly shifting policies and cultural contexts. Ten weeks of R&R1 is not a luxury; it’s a necessity.
For higher education faculty, summer break has 3 Rs: rest, relaxation, and research. That last R is critical for faculty at research-focused institutions, where intellectual productivity – measured by publications and grants – carries more weight for tenure and promotion than teaching and service. The irony is that academic institutions don’t give faculty time for the component of our job that most determines our success. That’s what summer and sabbaticals are for.
I have had 22 summers as a faculty member and I have started each of them the same way: identifying the project (or projects) that I want to work on, whether it was preparing a proposal for a new book or grant, doing research for a manuscript, or writing chapters or journal articles. The only exception prior to this year was 2019, when I was wrapping up chemo and undergoing radiation therapy.
But after a school year that started with eye surgery and ended in institutional “restructuring” – not to mention getting my son through the last year of high school, the college application process, and his Eagle Scout project – I knew that what I needed most this summer was not to write, but to rest. I decided that – with the exception of two speaking events, an eight-week MBSR course, and a weeklong DMIN intensive course – I would spend a good part of summer resting.
Now, as I look ahead to the coming academic year, I am reflecting on what I’ve learned through my summer of R&R.
I started my R&R summer in early June. Pretty immediately, I realized that I am not nearly as good at resting as I thought.
When I am in writing mode, at least three days a week, I start my mornings writing at a coffee shop. Writing in public spaces helps me stay focused, the buzz of conversations in the background serving as a sort of brown noise that helps my concentration. This past semester, I became even more dependent on coffee shops as the tension on campus made working in the office unpleasant. It was part of my routine.
During my first week of R&R, I found myself in one of my favorite coffee shops. I ordered my usual drink, sat at my usual spot, pulled out my laptop, and then…wait, what I am doing? I don’t have any work to do. I spent some time piddling around on the computer, then packed up and went home.
I tried staying home. I worked on my Lego kits. After those were done, I felt angsty. I missed the coffee shop, but I didn’t know what to do there. Then I realized that coffee shops were not actually meant to be workspaces. They were meant to be places where you enjoyed coffee! I had to learn how to go to a coffee shop and just be.
I knew how to rest as a way of gearing up for the next thing. Now I am learning to rest for no reason. The lessons from Tricia Hersey’s Rest Is Resistance and We Will Rest! are finally sinking in.
Rest does not always mean sleeping, sitting, or lying down. In my twenty years of teaching about self-care, I have often talked about rest as inactivity. Dictionaries characterize rest as the absence of motion ( as a noun) or the cessation of activity (as a verb). But I had an experience this summer that challenges that understanding.
Not having a writing project freed up my mornings. I no longer had to place strict protections around my writing time. I could respond to texts and calls from family and friends. I could chat with my coffee shop friends instead of giving a quick hello. But my favorite thing became walking.
Midway through summer, one (sometimes two!) of my aunts and I started getting together once a week to walk. We alternate between two recreation centers that have indoor tracks (because it’s summer in Georgia). We walk for an hour, getting in close to three miles each time. We talk the whole time. And no matter how quick a pace we keep up, I always feel energized afterward. I feel rested.
With fibromyalgia, fatigue is a constant companion for me. I have to be very mindful of how I expend my energy. Sometimes my fatigue needs a break from activity. Sometimes it needs the increased blood flow and hormonal rush that comes from a good workout. Sometimes it needs the psychological safety of spending time with someone who loves me.
Rest can be a cessation from activity, but it could also be engaging in activity and relationships that are restorative – that energize, renew, and revive us.
I knew the past academic year would be a tough one. Major life transitions always take up a lot of energy. There were some unexpected crises that made the year more stressful [then again, there always are]. My planned weekly rhythm fell apart early in the school year. Rest took a backseat as I rushed to respond to one fire after another. Instead of work-rest-work-rest, my pattern was more like hustle-hustle-hustle-crash. Every few weeks I’d have a day where I sat on the sofa immobilized by fatigue.
Crashing isn’t rest. It’s a sign of a nervous system that has been wrought to the point of utter exhaustion.
Unfortunately, it’s becoming a common pattern for people working in academic institutions. Where we were once required to create bricks without straw, we are now expected to build entire villages without either. Changes at the federal level are strangling institutions and cutting off access to funding for families. Each day there’s news of another university laying off hundreds of staff. The faculty and staff left behind will have to deal with increased responsibilities amid fewer resources.
The systems will gaslight us. They will use our educational missions to guilt us into pushing our bodies and minds to the brink of exhaustion. We will gaslight ourselves, telling us to push through until the next break. Meanwhile, our physical and psychic energy will wane. Faculty will find it harder to muster the creative energy to complete the projects needed to maintain or advance our careers. Staff will lack the emotional and cognitive bandwidth to respond to the normal challenges that arise during an academic year, let alone these new roadblocks. As a whole, we will become less effective, less innovative, and eventually less motivated. Unless we rest.
I did not declare this an R&R summer just because I was tired. I did it because I was so exhausted that I lacked clarity. I was too tired to think, too tired to create, too tired to dream. Last week, after almost six weeks of rest, I began to dream in fragments. My challenge as the academic year begins will be to practice regular rhythms of rest. I cannot afford to wait for the next break, next summer, or even the next period of institutional stability. My body needs rest. So does my work.
Did anything in this essay resonate with you? Take this moment to check in with yourself. What practices of rest are working for you? Where do you need to improve?
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R&R = rest and relaxation
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