Whether you are a student, a teacher, or a parent, the beginning of the school year is often one of the more stressful times of the year. This might be especially true this particular year, when so many of us have been online for nearly a year and a half and have settled into new routines as a result. Do we even remember how to do an in-person “back to school,” let alone one that feels like an odd mix of trepidation (is this even safe?) and enthusiasm for a “return to (sort of) normal”? How do we do this “back to school” thing again? It has been a while for all of us.
I know that I myself, during my first day of class, had a deja vu moment of “wait, did I really do an entire school year fully online? Was that actually not last spring where things moved online mid-way through?” (Answer: you knew the answer to this one already though—yes, self, it really HAS been nearly a full school year and a half since everything was in person.) So, regardless of the exact amount of time since we did the whole in-person thing, here we are, I guess, and it certainly hasn’t gotten easier to navigate the potential stress of this time.
Pre-pandemic, no matter how many times I had a first day or week back to teaching, this return to school—especially the first full week—always had me feeling a little like I was hit by a steamroller. The surprising physical energy of managing a classroom is something that other teachers will surely be familiar with. In my post-grad teaching fellowship at UVa, which meant teaching 3 college English courses on top of my fitness teaching load, I remember that on Thursdays, which just tended to be the day that everything would “hit me” so to speak, I would hardly have the energy to talk to anybody: the effort of getting all my thoughts in my brain out of my mouth was just too much! New teachers, if you are reading this: please trust me that it DOES get easier, even if nobody has told you that yet. (Nobody told me that!) When I very first starting teaching yoga, my ONE weekly yoga class would practically wipe me out, not from the physical practice, but the mental energy of juggling the many simultaneous things that were happening: sequencing the class, monitoring how everyone was doing, adjusting the sequencing accordingly (FYI: one of my favorite parts of teaching now is how I spontaneously improvise as I go along—teaching, once you have experience, is a little like being a specialized performance artist). But, way back in the day, after I taught that one Monday evening class, I was really a little zapped: post-yoga, I would always go to Boylan Heights, a hamburger place on the Corner in Charlottesville, and buy myself a hamburger for dinner, which also cost basically what I was paid for that one yoga class. It was worth it, no matter how many times doing that I actually thought “this hamburger IS my yoga class that I just taught.”
Anyways, to make a long story short: if you are a new teacher, keep going. It will get easier. That said, no matter how much experience you have, and no matter your role within the back-to-school time, that time can just be a bit of a shock to the system. Here are my tips for managing that jolt, whether you are a teacher, parent, or student.
