This will be my 25th year in education.

Summer holidays are a sacred blessing for K-12 educators. For the ten-month school year, we give this work our all — often to the point of mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion. Then summer blissfully arrives, and with it, an extended emotional intermission.

We have our critics, of course. Friends and family in other industries cry foul at the holidays we enjoy. They take their jabs boldly as they look on from the outside.

But ask any K-12 educator what they think of summer, and they’ll tell you: this is not a season to be taken lightly.

It’s not quite accurate or fair to dismiss these weeks as a bonanza of pleasures. Yes, we have our fun.

Summer is our time to rebuild, restore, recharge, revive. It’s how we stay active and committed to this work.

This season is sacred.

I need a day or two to mourn the end

This week, I reported back to my school. Classes haven’t begun yet, but it’s time to begin meeting as an administrative team. It’s time to support our new teachers as they meet our community for the first time.

It’s time prepare for another successful year.

As I brew my first coffee, my mind continues the transition it’s made every August for the last 24 years. I flash back through highlights from July and August: the adventures in Italy, the mountain hikes closer to home, the visits to Winnipeg and Vancouver Island and the Okanagan. I have much to be thankful for.

These days also gave me the time and space to enjoy the precious, unhurried moments that mean so much.

• Lunch dates with my wife at a cafe near our home.
• The peace of coffee and reading on quiet, sunny mornings.
• The satisfaction of completing a deep reorganization of my home office.

And let us not forget the absolute luxury of sleeping in or taking afternoon naps. Summer reminds us what it feels like to live well-slept and unstressed for multiple days in a row.

Summer is wonderful, and as it closes, there’s a mourning that is appropriate.

Let’s take a moment of silence to say good-bye.

Embracing the return of mission and deep purpose

The work of K-12 education is many things, but one thing that rings true in every school on the planet: our work has profound significance.

We’re not on a warehouse assembly line making widgets all day, folks. And we need our widget makers. But our work is much more human than that.

Education is still — and will always be — a people business.

Each new school day brings amazing, existential, life-altering opportunities. Opportunities to make a difference.

To support reconciliation and restoration.

To create community and belonging for little humans.

To guide that teenager who is struggling to find his way.

To call out the good we see in that girl who feels invisible.

To defend the undefended and empower the disempowered.

To let that defeated single parent know that we believe in their child.

To encourage that colleague who is doing inspiring work but feels exhausted.

To affirm that administrator who took a courageous position and is facing the fire.

To unlock passions and talents and skills that have been lying dormant, waiting to be named.

In loco parentis means in place of parents. For seven hours a day, you and I interact with hundreds of young humans who are learning, growing, and finding their place in this world.

I know it’s hard work.

I know it’s exhausting.

I know there are days when it takes everything out of us.

There will be days when we’ll cry, we’ll be shaken, and we’ll feel like failures. We’ll wonder why we even bother.

It’s particularly for those days that I’m here to remind you: your faithful service is making an important, inestimable impact. It matters.

So let’s press forward.

Let’s lean in.

Let’s learn and grow and support each other and love kids well.

This is season 25 for me in education, and I’m lacing ’em up once again.

As I wrote in January, I still get to do this.

Have a fantastic year, colleague.