The new school year… we all feel how hugely significant this is every year. We are flooded with media footage of the preparations for school – uniforms, books, shoes. Conversations among parents centre on their level of preparedness, whilst children start to anticipate who will be their new teacher and their new classmates. Even the intensity of traffic flow on our roads changes when schools resume for the year. At times, it can feel as though the beginning of the new school year is bigger than the festivities around New Year’s Eve.
The Effects of the Holidays
During the long summer break the many routines associated with getting children to school every day have often been set aside for the holidays. This is usually accompanied by a change in behavioural expectations between parents and children as they go into holiday mode. When school resumes, there is a sense that the school will redress the imbalance between the holiday behaviours and the more routine, day to day school requirements. Many teachers observe that initially students are challenged by the renewed focus on learning and readjusting to the behavioural standards of the school.
The Media
The intensity of the beginning of the new school year is highlighted and broadcast into living rooms across the country by both traditional and social media. From the constant stream of advertisements for school uniforms and supplies, to the footage of families preparing for school, (particularly those families with children starting school for the first time), we are flooded with images of the grand return. From two weeks beforehand, we are presented with school-based feature articles in the news and it is interesting to observe the themes that come around each year. At the time of writing, the national focus was on anxiety in High School students, the recurring theme of national testing and on how some parents were ‘doing it tough’ and in need of financial support. It is insightful to observe how these, and many other, themes recycle in and out each year.
Changes at School
Within each school, there are clearly huge external changes at this time with completely different configurations of people placed together. Teachers change grades and classrooms; students change peer groups and classes; there are also many who change schools and geographical location, as well as significant changes in administration staff. Policy changes are often instigated over the summer break and add their impact to the mix with their often short time frames in which to implement the new directives.
These factors are all greatly intensified when there is a change of principal at a school as many Principals often believe that they have to be the new broom sweeping through and making the changes that establish their personal signature.
Can You Feel the Force?
Clearly there is an intense maelstrom of activity and force that characterises the beginning of each new school year. While still on holiday, teachers and principals start to anticipate the myriad of things that need to be done before school resumes. This is then often accompanied by a rise in anxiety and a driven urgency to get back early and get on with it.
This results in the physical body being placed under huge tension, like an elastic band that is being stretched to its absolute maximum length.
When we return to school, we often find the elastic band snaps back almost violently and the body goes into an extreme and forceful motion, reminiscent of the police shows of the 70’s with officers busting into a dangerous crime scene.
In short, the body starts the year in an elevated state of tension on red alert. It’s GO GO GO!
The classroom becomes the focal point of this maelstrom of intensity. All of these factors (school, family, media) work together and everyone contributes to this smorgasbord of anxiety, excitement, anticipation and tension that becomes our classrooms’ new beginning for the year.
Is it that everyone involved is setting themselves up for exhaustion right from the very start?
Yet we persist in seeing each new school year as a fresh start. However, how fresh is each start if we are still in the same elevated energy each and every year that school re-commences?
We start with intensity, and then we stop at the end of every term in exhaustion. We re-start with intensity and we again end in exhaustion. Is this not simply generating never ending straight lines of no progression, from the beginning to the end of each and every year?
Each and every year we are running the 21st century treadmill of the faster paced terms, which include: data weighted teaching practices with their accompanying targets, accountability, increasingly complex curriculum, national testing agendas, interviews, meetings, data entry, reports and… teaching.
Basically, we are running a marathon at the pace of a hundred metre sprint with the reward of a well-deserved holiday as we collapse over the finish line, only to resume this pattern when the new school year recommences.
Life Beyond the Treadmill – Into The Flow of our Natural Cycles
In education it appears that we are constantly substituting exhaustion as our end point, rather than enjoying a satisfying sense of completion at the end of each day, each week, each term and each year. We start in the elevation of hyperstimulation - like the beginning of the new school year - and end in exhaustion. These are the shaky foundations of shifting sands upon which we build our next ‘new beginning’ for the ensuing day, week, term and year. Clearly this is not sustainable – a fact echoed and confirmed by the bodies of teachers and students the world over.
We live in this perception that we move along this series of unending straight lines from day to day, week to week, term to term and year to year. Has this perception actually been seriously undermining our health and well-being by placing us in this constantly recurring flux of stop – start movement, of intensity, hyperstimulation and exhaustion?
This false cycle of intensity followed by exhaustion can never confer a truly new beginning; it guarantees only that we will experience more and more of the same, whether it be from day to day, term to term or from year to year. To coin a phrase, in this momentum, we are constantly circulating ‘same ole, same ole.’ This ‘same ole, same ole’ is fuelled by mental drive and excess nervous energy and then perpetuated by the media and by the systemic custom and practices in schools.
Is it possible for any one person, be that an educator, a student, a parent or an administrator, to step off this treadmill? There are a multitude of tried and tested solutions to address this. They usually take the form of working harder, working ‘smarter, not harder,’ burning the candle at both ends, fuelling oneself on coffee, chocolate and end of the day ‘wine downs’ and of course planning for holidays and early retirement.
Could it be that we are overlooking the most simple way of working and being in this situation? Is one highly effective way of supporting ourselves simply going to bed early? The old adage early to bed, early to rise, actually confirms the absolute common sense and wisdom of listening to our body and responding to its natural and innate cycles of rest and restoration.
Observing both nature and our own bodies offers us the wisdom that there can be no activity or motion without an accompanying period of deep and restorative rest and repose. There can be no day without the night. This is an unceasing and constant cycle that consistently reflects truth to us – a truth we can reconnect with to our profound advantage and well-being.
Nature also offers us this cycle of motion and repose through the movement of the seasons and the phases of the moon, confirming how essential is the dance of activity preceded by deep rest.
What is on offer with these cycles for us to deepen or rediscover as educators?
At the simplest baseline level, when we respond to the body and build a consistent routine of early to bed, early to rise, we usually find we wake up earlier, very much energised and vitalised and truly ready for a new beginning to our day. The ‘new’ in the new beginning is actually brought to the day by we ourselves, as we are deeply rested and able to commit with full vigour to all that is before us. Over time, we develop a consistency with this rhythm and our days begin to flow as we have connected with the wisdom of our true cycles, a wisdom that is inherent in every single body on this earth.
Everybody on earth responds profoundly to this cycle of night and day, to the rhythm of activity and rest; every body responds to the cyclic movement of the earth around the Sun, the movement that unfolds our seasonal cycles.
Observing the wisdom of these cycles brings the awareness that it is only through the true completion of letting go at the end of each day, and surrendering into deep rest, that unfolds our genuinely new beginnings. Letting go at the end of each day includes allowing ourselves the grace of time and space to appreciate how we have been in the day in our activity. This then sets the platform for us to surrender into a profoundly nurturing phase of deep rest. In this restorative rest, our new beginnings unfold.
This is the wisdom of what the cycles of nature reflect to us all, a wisdom we can each embody in full, if we so choose.
It is for each of us to choose the quality of our new beginnings by aligning with nature and our own bodies.
In this, we have the opportunity as teachers to truly mark the beginning of each school year as a cycle and approach and enrich it with our own true well-being, where we can each be the one with the spring in our step and the enthusiasm to embrace everything that is in front of us.