Lesson Planning That Cares For me, Me, ME!!!
I’m not assuming that this happens to every teacher…but it definitely happens to me:
When it’s time for lesson planning, I spend ALL my focus and energy on preparing for students and their needs. And poor, little ‘ol me gets completely lost and neglected.
It’s sad.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t forget about myself on purpose. It’s like I have this messed up, auto-pilot issue going on. I think my upbringing and traumatic experiences during childhood hardwired me to automatically be hypervigilant of others’ needs. It’s part of what makes teaching so soul-scrapingly exhausting for me.
That being said, maybe now you will know why I felt so proud of myself when I was flipping through a notebook and saw this August (week-before-school-started) journal entry. Here’s a picture of the journal and then I’ll type it out so you don’t have to decipher my chicken-scratch handwriting.
Ugh!!! Waking up sooooooo early to start school at 7:15am. Double ugh.
Ideas for self-care in the fall:
1- How to deal with waking up early:
Get enough sleep. I usually don’t do so well if I only get 6 or 7 hours of sleep. So in order to give myself a chance to have a more energized mood, I need to prioritize getting 7 and 1/2 or 8 hours of sleep.
Bottom line…I need to have a 9pm bedtime.
Have enough margin in the morning. I’m realizing that my anxiety level increases if I rush in the morning before school. So in order to give myself a chance to have less anxiety, I need to give myself enough time at home before I leave for school.
Bottom line…I need to wake up at 5am.
Bottom line #2…I have to have my outfit, lunch for the day and lesson materials ready the night before so that I’m not scrambling with those things in the morning.
Bottom line #3…I need to do a morning stretch and some bodyweight exercises while I’m waiting for the coffee to brew.
Bottom line #4…I need to eat my breakfast slowly. I need to breathe deeply and I need to take a few moments to log my feelings on the How We Feel app.
Hahahahaha!! Planning out when to pee in between classes!! Sorry. TMI.
2- How to deal with teaching 3, 80-minute blocks in a row:
Go pee after block 1.
Have greek yogurt and protein granola after block 1.
Have a glass of cold brew at the end of SMART period.
Maybe have my 9th graders be in charge of a beginning of class routine. Maybe tack on an occasional student-led-self-care-check-in as part of the beginning of class routine.
I’m a nervous nelly that tends to obsessively think about school outside of school hours. That habit drained me. So I wrote some ideas of what I could occupy myself with outside of school hours to help take my mind off of school.
3- What can I do to care for myself outside of school hours to make the teaching load more sustainable?
Prepare for a half marathon (it will give me something big to work on to help take my mind off of my school responsibilities outside of school hours.
run 5ks on tuesday and thursday.
long run on saturdays
buy new running shoes
stretch and strengthen body 5 days a week.
Eat to fuel my body and not as a way of coping with stress.
take naps
snuggle wifey and talk together
tease and play with daughters
make sure to have a weekly family time to talk calendar and finances.
Yep!
That’s what I wrote in August of 2024. And it worked!! I built into my planning some planning for my SELF. Here are some celebration-self-care pics from the 2024-25 school year:
We trained for 9 months!! This is me and my wife in the hotel room on the morning of the Pittsburgh half marathon.
Us at the starting line.
Me at the finish line after 13.1 miles!! (ugh — sorry — I didn’t pee my pants. That’s just sweat. Embarrassing. Sorry.)
We bought ourselves running shoes. Training for 9 months really DID help me take my mind off of school so much. It gave me something else BIG to think about and work on.
I also wanted to snuggle and tease my daughters as part of self care for myself. Thanks wifey for teaching me that playfulness is important in life!
I packed mid-morning healthy snacks to help me get through teaching 3, 80 minute blocks before lunch time.
ooooooo — and I didn’t mention this above…but I bought myself some nice hand soap and hid it behind the fridge in the faculty lounge. After my 3 classes were done I would wash my hands for a while and take a big breath in to smell the yummy fragrance and to breath out the stress of the morning of teaching.
Hooray for including my needs in lesson planning and yearly planning time!!
