You’ve been tired since October

Something shifts in a school building around this time of year.

It’s hard to name exactly. The work hasn’t stopped. The expectations haven’t changed. But the energy is different. Your students feel it. You feel it. And the gap between what you want these final weeks to look like and what you actually have left in the tank is wider than it’s ever been.

You’ve been going since the end of last summer.

Through October’s slump, when daylight savings hit and everything got harder for no reason. Through December’s complete chaos and the frantic sprint to winter break. Through that long, relentless stretch of February and March where every week felt like it lasted three.

You’re tired in a way that sleep doesn’t quite fix. And now there are a handful of weeks left, and your students have mentally clocked out. Half of them are already in summer mode. The other half are showing up, barely.

You still care. That hasn’t changed. You still want these last days to mean something. You just don’t have the same capacity you did in September to build something meaningful from scratch.

And every evening you sit down to plan, the familiar cycle starts: open the laptop, stare into the abyss, scroll TPT, go to bed with a version of a plan…

I see this every year, and I’ve been thinking about what to do about it.

Tomorrow, I want to talk to you about what those last few weeks can actually look like – and how to get there without sacrificing whatever sleep and sanity you have left.