August begins in June

Every year, May comes with the same promise: the finish line is in sight. Yet the school year doesn’t end so much as it crescendos. For teachers, and especially those of us raising school-aged children, May is a month of overlap.

Our students’ final projects and papers collide with our children’s banquets, field trips, exams, and ceremonies. Then June arrives. The gradebook closes. The pace softens.

And somewhere in the midst of that exhale, I find myself thinking about August.

People often talk about summer as though teachers flip a switch. One day we’re teaching; the next we’re floating in a pool with not a care in the world apart from another tennis match and glass of rosé.

But somewhere between tennis matches and pool visits, the next school year quietly begins to take shape.

Last week, I started sketching out ideas for fall. I’m considering reducing my composition course from four major writing projects to three, not because I want students to do less work, but because I want them to have more time to wrestle with ideas, revise, and work through the inevitable moments of getting stuck.

I’ve also been thinking about ways to move writing beyond the classroom walls. How can students write with real audiences in mind? How can they see writing not merely as an academic exercise, but as a way of participating in their communities?

These questions have taken on new urgency in the age of AI. Much of the conversation focuses on efficiency: faster drafting, quicker feedback, more streamlined workflows.

Efficiency certainly has its place.

But the best teaching has never been built on efficiency alone.

Teaching begins with curiosity. It begins with asking whether there might be a better way to help students encounter ideas, stories, and one another.

No chatbot told me to rethink my assignments. Those questions emerged from a year of face to face conversations with real students and a persistent belief that the humanities matter because they help us better understand what it means to be human.

Summer doesn’t answer those questions. It simply creates space to sit with them.

And in that quiet space, next year’s course begins to take shape.