There’s a Bored Teachers meme that I recently saw, and it was a first-year teacher asking a veteran how they manage to do it all. The veteran’s response was that the didn’t do it all. She picks her battles. She sets boundaries. She doesn’t grade everything, doesn’t always turn in her plans on time, doesn’t try to impress anyone. She gets her job done within school hours and saves the rest of herself for her family.
If you’re a new teacher reading this in the chaos the first week of school or back to school season, I have a few tips for you that I have learned over the years.
The beginning of the school year is exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone outside education. It’s not just the hours, it’s the sheer volume of new names, new systems, new copies, new emails, new everything, all landing at once. So consider this my list of back to school tips for teachers, veteran teacher to newer teacher, for keeping your energy up and protecting your sanity through it.
Table of Contents
The most important back to school tip for teachers: self-care isn’t optional
Sleep, food, and hydration are not extras this time of year, they’re the things holding the whole operation together.
FYI: I only endorse things that I've personally used or have come highly recommended from my teacher friends and family and think they may be helpful to you. If you buy anything mentioned using my Amazon referral links, I may get a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Start with water. I drink 8-16 ounces before I even get to my morning coffee, and I keep a sugar-free electrolyte powder on hand to mix into my water throughout the school day. I also like to treat myself to a big bottle of something like Smartwater, some kind of water that feels like a small treat and is just easier for me to actually drink consistently. Think about how much you’re talking during those first few weeks: introductions, procedures, expectations, repeated a dozen times a day. You talk more in these first weeks than you will the rest of the year, so push the water harder than usual.
Sleep matters just as much. Get solid sleep in the nights leading up to the first day, and if you haven’t already, this is a good time to put stricter limits on phones and screens before bed. Aim for at least an hour or two of non-screen time before you try to fall asleep. (She says as she struggles to put her kindle away in wee hours of the night. . .. I’m still trying too!)
On food, everyone’s needs are different, but leaning on whole foods to keep your blood sugar steady, and making an actual plan so you don’t end up hangry by 2pm, goes a long way toward staying in a good headspace at school.
I also try to schedule a few self-care appointments about five to ten days before I’m contractually back at school. As a lady of a certain age, I try to limit the gray hairs on my head without looking like a witch which needs upkeep, so I book a hair appointment and a pedicure before sandal weather really kicks in. Those appointments double as a treat and leave me feeling more put together going into the year. The last one on my list is a maintenance appointment with my therapist. It’s a good way to process the frustrations and feelings that come with the job in a safe space, because a lot of my stress genuinely comes from work. Teaching ain’t easy, and it takes a real toll on your mental health if you don’t tend to it.
Guard the week of curriculum night like your life depends on it
If you have any control over your outside-of-school calendar, do not schedule anything demanding during the week of curriculum night or meet the teacher night or pretty much anything the first week or two of school.
Curriculum night hands down, one of the most draining weeks of the entire year. Yes weeks because the prep for curriculum night is exhausting. There are so many things to do to prepare for this while also getting the school year going. New students, a mountain of copies, back-to-back meetings, a stack of parent phone calls.
This is not the week to run a marathon, do a 24-hour dance-a-thon, get a dog (haha, I did that one last year!) or take on any other feat of endurance you could just as easily schedule for October. Try to save your big personal commitments for a calmer stretch of the calendar (if you are able).
Give yourself permission to order dinner
Budget a little extra for takeout during these first few weeks, and again during the last month of school. Those are the two stretches of the year when I have zero brain function left to decide what’s for dinner, let alone cook it. Ordering food without having to think about it is a small luxury that buys back a lot of peace.
Also stock up at the grocery store for extra grab and go items. Yogurt and bagged salads are a huge win for me not hitting the drive thru line at the end of the day. These will really help out when you are in a rush in the morning or can’t think a thought at the end of the night.
Sort your to-do list by when your classroom is actually empty
Before you panic about your task list, take a minute to sort it. What can get done while students are working independently in the room? What can get done while someone else is talking to your class, like a band demo or an assembly? And what actually requires an empty classroom?
Make sure to double check whether it’s actually appropriate before you bring a stack of papers to grade at a back to school assembly. Even if the timing works, it can look bad if you’re not fully present with your class. Once you’ve weeded out what can realistically happen at other times, what’s left is your real list, the stuff that has to happen when the room is empty of kids. That’s the list worth protecting your prep time for.
Don’t stress about sub plans yet
Most teachers simply don’t have the bandwidth to get sick in the first few weeks of school. Somehow teachers with their superpowers just push through and don’t call out unless it’s an actual emergency. That means sub plans usually aren’t the pressing concern they’ll feel like later in the year. If something unexpected does come up, your team should have your back. If they don’t, that tells you something important about the culture you just walked into.
Ask a veteran for their top five
Find a teacher in your building who seems to have it together and ask them what they think the five most important things to focus on right now? Veteran teachers have already done the work of figuring out what matters and what doesn’t, and they’re usually happy to hand that list over. They have the knowledge that your secretary gets overwhelmed the day before school or that the copier doesn’t get used as much at 5:30 PM or that the copier typically jams the two days before curriculum night and doesn’t get fixed until a week later. These are the tips that help to keep your head above water.
Let the decorating go
This on might be controversial, but the decorating is not a crucial task. Fun, yes. The number one thing on your to do list . .. no.
I say this as someone who has never once had a cutesy classroom. The Pinterest-worthy theme, the color-coordinated name tags, the elaborate bulletin board, none of it is where your limited prep time should go right now. That time will come later in the year if you want it, like the middle of September or so. For now, make a priority list and work down it, and let good enough be good enough. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, especially not in week one, two or three.
If it’s not a hell yes, let it be a no
When people ask you to take something on, whether it’s a favor, or a social plan, apply one filter does this actually excite you? If the answer is anything less than yes, it’s okay to say no. This applies just as much to your personal life as your professional one. You are allowed to pass on things you’re not genuinely excited about, especially right now.
New teachers, be careful about this one at your job. If your principal personally asks you to be a on a committee, tread carefully, since you do want to make a good impression and are most likely going to be evaluated for your outside of school participation on committees and other professional obligations.
School Committee Work
Work smarter not harder onto committees. Find out which ones meet once or twice a year and which ones meet pretty regularly. Make sure you have balance on your after school schedule.
Lunch Duty
Also be careful taking lunch duty if you are not required to do lunch duty. Typically the pay is pretty good where I teach, because the job can be the worst. In addition to teaching your class, taking on a lunch duty assignment can be extremely draining. The afternoons after a bad day of lunch duty can be some of the worst teaching days. Don’t do it! (If you don’t need to).
Protect your planning period like it’s sacred
You already have non-negotiables that take up your day, principal check-ins, copies, lesson prep. A 25-minute planning period disappears fast if you wander into the lounge or open social media. So guard it. Set a real goal, something like 20 minutes of focused prep and 5 minutes guilt-free for Wordle or the cat memes your grandma keeps sending you. There’s a time and place for both. Just be intentional about which is which.
Let kids pick their own seats at supply drop-off
If your school does a supply drop-off before the year starts, the day or two when parents bring their kids in to drop off supplies, meet you, and see the classroom, this is a small thing that saves real time. Let the kids pick their own seats (at least for the upper grades).
You skip building a seating chart from scratch based on a class list and nothing else, and the kids and their parents get to choose a spot where they feel comfortable learning. It’s not the Wild West. I keep those seats for the first few days or at most the first week, and by then I’ve learned enough about the kids to know who shouldn’t be next to whom, and I build a real seating chart from there, one that’s informed by actually watching them instead of guessing from a roster.
I don’t have a set desk arrangement I default to either. Every class is different, and depending on the group, groups of four, single islands, or pairs might work better. Getting to know the kids and how they interact before locking anything in tends to produce a seating chart that actually works.
Get creative about finding extra planning time
This one will not work for every teacher, but I wanted to put it into the universe if it helps someone. I teach fifth grade, the oldest kids in my building, and my grade level has a long-running tradition of being PE buddies with the kindergarten classes for the first few days of kindergarten’s PE classes.
Ask any elementary PE teacher and they’ll tell you that the first few days with kindergarteners are rough. These are kids who can’t tie their shoes yet, don’t know where anything in the school is, and get so caught up in the excitement of PE that they ignore the fact that they need the bathroom until it’s too late. Having a room full of big kids in there as buddies helps immensely, and it means the PE teacher doesn’t need me in the gym, they need my students, which means help for the PE teacher and extra free time for me!
So for those first few days, I get a handful of bonus planning sessions, completely legitimately. It won’t work in every building or with every schedule, but it costs nothing to ask. Talk to your PE teacher (maybe music, art, library or your reading buddies class) and see if something similar could work at your school. If it does, treat it like the gift it is.
Build the parent relationship before you need it
This one might be the single biggest time-saver on this whole list. Obviously you want a positive relationship with parents from day one. Taking the time to actually do it will help you avoid a lot of the lengthy back-and-forth emails and meetings that eat up your year.
Here’s what that looks like for me. At the end of the first day of school, I send an email to my entire class list. It recaps what we did, signals to parents that I know what I’m doing, and gives them a few talking points to use with their kids at dinner. I usually get a handful of replies thanking me for it, but the real value is that it reaches every parent and gives each of them a low-stakes chance to connect with me in a positive way. That alone takes a lot of the anxiety out of the room.
Most difficult parent situations, when you really look at them, come down to an anxious parent worried about their kid. Yes we all know it’s not supposed to be your job to manage a parent’s anxiety, but reaching out first (and reducing their anxiety) ends up saving you time. It also tells you a lot, early. If someone sends you an essay-length email on day two, you know to tread carefully with that family, because that’s likely a parent who needs more communication than most. Better to learn that in week one than after a miscommunication.
On the topic of email versus phone calls, when in doubt, make the phone call. The more personal the delivery, the better information tends to land, especially when it’s not great news. Send plenty of good-news emails, but pick up the phone when you’re unsure how something will be received. If you’re short on time, that’s fine too. You can keep it brief, let them know their child did something specific, that you wanted to tell them personally, and that you only have a few minutes today but are happy to talk more tomorrow. That small effort goes a long way toward heading off the unexpected, irritated parent, because people tend to soften once they feel like you made the effort to reach out directly. Parents also tend to shape their perception off of the story they heard first, so if their kid is shaping up a story to save themselves, you will inadvertently have extra work to do with the parents- which is super frustrating as a teacher.
My district usually starts school on a Wednesday, which to me is the perfect length for that first, exhausting week. So I send an email on day one, a recap email that Friday covering the whole first week, and then a weekly newsletter after that. The newsletters build a steady sense of calm for families over the year, and they don’t take that much time after the first year of creating a weekly newsletter. I keep a running doc in Google Drive and mostly adapt what I wrote the year before. It rarely takes more than ten minutes.
The bottom line
Nobody, not even the teachers who look like they have it all figured out, actually has it all figured out. They’ve just gotten better at deciding what to let go of (or giving themselves permission to not do the dumb things that the higher ups expect that isn’t best practice for the kids). If you take one thing from these back to school tips for teachers, learn to pick your battles, protect your time, and remember that surviving the first few weeks with your sanity intact is its own kind of success.
Your Thoughts
Do you have any tips or thoughts to add? How do you feel at the beginning of the school year? Please share below!
