18: End of Year 26

Besides going to bed at 5:30, what does an elementary teacher do after the last day of school with students? For me, it was grabbing margaritas with my team and then hitting up Starbucks. Then probably bed.

This was my fourth year in first grade and my twenty-sixth year overall as a teacher. I started teaching in 1999, which means I taught in the old millenium and century. Back then I didn’t have a cell phone, and my email was used sparingly. Voicemail was a biggie for communication. Now I typically send texts via an app to parents, which has a Twitter-like feed. Most correspondence is digital. My box has over 10,000 emails saved, although I thankfully keep up on reading them. Not only did my students never experience 9/11, they can’t remember the pandemic. My point? I’m old.

Thankfully I still feel young, so there’s that. I’ll be back in my first grade classroom come the first full week of August. I still love my job and the daily grind; in fact, summer scares me a bit. I need to stay busy—it’s in my DNA. Only teachers would understand the frantic pace of school coming to a screeching halt for summer—it’s like driving an IndyCar into a brick wall and then nine weeks later expecting to get back in and floor it. Don’t get me wrong—I love the break…within reason.

My goals for the Summer of 2025: exercise more, write more, read more. Keep things simple. It’s going to be tough; like I said, I don’t handle downtime well. I need to practice chilling out.