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Somewhere around the second week of June, a familiar guilt sets in.
You've closed your gradebook. You've said goodbye to your students. You've maybe even cleaned out your desk. And for approximately four days, you've done nothing school-related, which, if you're anything like me, means you've spent four days feeling vaguely like you should be doing something school-related.
So you open your laptop. You sign up for a PD session. You start revising that unit that's been bothering you since October. You tell yourself this is fine, actually good, because you're a professional and professionals don't just sit there.
And just like that, summer is colonized.
Teaching is one of the only professions where the built-in recovery time has been systematically reclaimed by the job itself. Summer break — once genuinely a break — has become an extension of the school year by other means. We take graduate courses for recertification credits. We attend curriculum planning sessions. We revise rubrics, redesign units, and catch up on the professional reading we didn't have time for in April. Administrators schedule PD days in July. Districts roll out new initiatives in August that require "preparation" before school even starts.
None of this is malicious. Most of it is well-intentioned. The field moves fast, and there's always something legitimate to learn or improve. But somewhere in the accumulated logic of "summers are a good time for this," we've lost track of what that time was actually supposed to do.
Here's what the research actually tells us: the brain doesn't generate its best ideas when it's scheduled. A 2025 review in Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences identifies the brain's default mode network — the system that activates when you're not focused on an external task — as a key driver of creative thinking, specifically because it supports the kind of remote associative thinking and novel connection-making that focused work tends to suppress. A 2024 study published in Brain went further, using direct neural recordings to show a causal link: disrupting the default mode network during creative tasks measurably reduced participants' ability to generate original ideas. And in a widely cited 2014 study published in the Creativity Research Journal, psychologist Sandi Mann found that participants who completed a boring, passive task before a creative challenge significantly outperformed those who went straight to the creative work. The idle brain, it turns out, is doing something.
For teachers, this isn't abstract. Think about the last time you had a genuinely good idea about your teaching: a new way to frame a concept, a project structure that actually made sense, a better question to ask. Chances are it didn't happen while you were sitting in a PD session taking notes. It happened in some unscheduled moment when your brain was doing something else entirely.
Unstructured time isn't the absence of productive thought. It is productive thought, just in a form we've been trained not to recognize or value.
I'm not making a case for nine weeks of television. The issue isn't rest versus work; it's the difference between intentional recovery and reflexive busyness. These are not the same thing, even when they look similar from the outside.
When I take a course in June to finish recertification credits, that's not rest. It's task completion. When I spend August rewriting a curriculum unit because the version I used felt off, that's not creative thinking. It's revision work, valuable in its own right, but not the same as giving my mind the space to figure out what it actually wants to do differently. Those are both fine things. But if they fill the entire summer, I come back in September having maintained the machine without ever stepping back to ask whether the machine is pointed in the right direction.
The best teachers I know — the ones who seem genuinely energized in September, who show up with new ideas and real curiosity — tend to have done something over the summer that had nothing to do with school. They read novels. They traveled somewhere uncomfortable. They picked up a hobby they were bad at. They cooked elaborate meals, or took long bike rides, or just sat in their backyards long enough to get bored. And boredom, it turns out, is generative. It's the cognitive state in which humans start asking "what if" instead of "what's next."
For administrators: this applies to your teachers, but it also applies to you. The instinct to use summer to plan, to launch, to prepare the next initiative is understandable. But a staff that comes back in August having never fully exhaled is a staff that will hit October running on fumes. Protecting summer — really protecting it, not just saying "of course you should rest" while scheduling a full week of August PD — is an investment in what your school looks like in March.
Here's what I'd actually suggest, for whatever it's worth from someone who has spent more than a few Julys revising rubrics when I should have been reading on a porch:
Protect at least a few weeks that belong only to you. Not "catch-up" weeks, not "light work" weeks. Weeks with no school-related tasks. Schedule them explicitly, the same way you'd schedule a commitment you actually intend to keep.
Let yourself be a beginner at something. Taking a class is fine, but take one that has nothing to do with your professional development. Learn to throw pottery. Take a drawing course. Do something you're not good at yet. There's a kind of cognitive humility in beginner-brain that is genuinely useful when you go back to teaching, and it's hard to manufacture in any other way.
Resist the urge to optimize. The summer to-do list that starts reasonably and ends up spanning two pages is a trap most of us know well. Some revision, some planning, some preparation — sure. But if the list is long enough that completing it would require working every day, the list is not a plan. It's anxiety wearing a productive disguise.
Read something delightful and useless. Not a pedagogy book. Not a leadership memoir. Something you'd be embarrassed to cite in a professional context. Fiction, preferably. Long, unhurried, the kind of reading that you do because the story is good and for no other reason.
Teaching is an act of sustained creative labor, and like all creative labor, it requires genuine replenishment, not the performance of rest, but the real thing. The field asks a lot. It asks for patience in circumstances that would exhaust anyone, creativity on a schedule, emotional generosity on days when you have very little left.
You cannot refill that from a PD session. You cannot manufacture it through another round of curriculum revision. You can only really get it back by doing the unfashionable thing: actually stopping, for long enough that your brain remembers what it thinks about when no one is asking it to think about anything in particular.
Summer is supposed to be for that. Let it be.
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