Why doesn’t summer always feel like a break?

BY STEVE NUZUM

There are gratifying things about the end of the school year, like reflecting on the growth individual students have made, seeing commencement ceremonies and awards ceremonies and other end-of-year celebrations, anticipating summer plans. 

And summer break can be truly restoring and liberating, for many of us. It can be a time to get in touch with the parts of our lives that maybe haven’t gotten as much attention during the school year. A time to have new experiences, to travel if we’re able, to see friends and family. 

But for many teachers-- and I was definitely one of them-- it’s a bittersweet time, too. I wrote about teacher burnout and exhaustion a few weeks ago, and for many education workers, the end of school is where feelings of burnout come to a head. 

Often, starting around April, we’ve pushed ourselves a little too hard to get over the “finish line” of the year.  Maybe we’ve slept less, or eaten less. Maybe it has taken significantly more patience to deal with students who are anxious to be on break, or students who are afraid of the loss of structure and routine that school provides. 

And maybe we’re dealing with some of those same kinds of feelings, ourselves.

The beginning of summer break, when I was teaching full time, often brought with it a kind of empty, numb feeling. Sometimes depression, sometimes sadness. A feeling that my body and mind were too tired to process what had just happened over the past ten months, or that the frenzy of activity that saw its climax at the end of the year had left me directionless or even purposeless.

The longer I did the job, the more I found ways to mitigate these feelings, to try to see those two months of summer as times to rest and pursue other interests. But I also think, for me, the feelings were not just personal. They were at least a structural feature of the modern teaching profession.  

Goals are probably healthy, but in modern education some goals-- including some which were abstract to the point of absurdity-- have become a toxic obsession.

When I was in elementary school, I remember vividly a poster by the door that led from an inside hallway to the steps down to the playground. I read, “Life is a journey, not a destination.” 

Modern education often takes the opposite approach. During my career, “Design with the end in mind” became an almost-religious mantra. 

“Design with the end in mind” often meant teach to the test, but deny that you are doing so. It assumed that summative assessments are the purpose of education. It also seemed to rest on a series of premises about education that, as Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider point out in their book The Education Wars, are based on theoretical destinations, rather than ongoing and real journeys-- a framing that has often been created by and for the benefit of powerful interests pushing school vouchers, “alternative” private educational services, and the defunding of public education. 

Our state report card, for example, is premised on the idea that schools should be assessed based on something called “college and career readiness”. Our state academic standards, created and cyclically reviewed under state law, contain that phrase. The premise is that the value of schools is entirely in outcomes: what will students be able to do after they leave school? And the value of students, implicitly, is reduced to the revenue they will generate or the degrees they will earn (so that they can generate more revenue).

Being realistic about what education actually does for student outcomes would be great.  But if we wanted to know that, we would likely conduct more longitudinal studies about what ultimately does happen to students in colleges, in careers, and in other areas of life. Does a solid education make us live longer? (Some research suggests it does.) Does it make us more satisfied? (This study suggests it might contribute to our overall cognitive and emotional wellbeing, and specifically highlights the value of socialization, something not measured by state tests.) Do test scores actually tell us a lot about how students will do in college? (Some studies suggest that GPA is a much better predictor than standardized testing.)

Instead, the state report card is all about the metric that is easiest to use to beat up on schools: the student test result.  And so many teachers and students spend the entire school year struggling to change a score on a test that isn’t actually designed to tell us much about the impact of schools on students.

And for many teachers, the idea of “designing with the end in mind” distracts from our reasons for getting up and doing the job each day. And it certainly distracts from many of the clearest motivations students have for getting up and going to school. 

School becomes a Sisyphean grind modeled on everything many of us hate about modern work culture: a jettisoning of personal fulfillment or meaning in favor of a Taylorist obsession with efficiency, an alienation of teachers and students from the ambiguous “product” of education, a toxic positivity that tells us we should be grateful for the opportunity to work so hard to achieve a goal which is distant from anything we have any personal vested interest in achieving. 

And so it’s hard, as a teacher or student, to stay personally invested in an increasingly impersonal system, to find intrinsic motivation in increasingly abstracted tasks.  

Add on to that hot temperatures, tired and cranky students and staff, and maybe a feeling that the “end” we designed and toiled so hard for is just a big rock that rolls back down the hill for us to push up again next year, and sometimes it can be hard to get excited about the process, or to see “summer break” as a break. It can feel more like Sisypus briefly walking back down the hill to retrieve that rock. 

Maybe one solution to the complex set of problems making teachers and students tired is shifting the focus back to something that is actually meaningful.  Designing with the experience of school and the intrinsic value of learning in mind might help re-energize all of us.