The Half-Hour Holiday Rule

The Half-Hour Holiday Rule

There’s a strange pressure that shows up during every school break—the quiet panic that if you stop moving, you’ll somehow fall behind.

You promise yourself rest, but then you find a stack to grade, a hallway to organize, an idea for next semester that “can’t wait.”

Before you know it, the break is gone, and you’ve traded rest for a different kind of work.

Here’s a new rule to try: take thirty minutes each day of your break for something that serves you, not school.

Read fiction. Take a nap. Sit outside and watch the world go by without feeling guilty about it.

The world will not combust. Your students will still learn. The emails will still be there—but you’ll meet them with a full tank instead of fumes.

The point isn’t productivity disguised as rest; it’s permission.

Permission to exist as a whole person outside of your role.

That’s what sustainable teaching actually looks like—cycles of exertion balanced by deliberate stillness.

Use this half-hour to remind yourself what life feels like when you’re not measuring it in lesson plans or learning targets.

Because a rested teacher is a better teacher—not out of duty, but out of presence.

Spend one of those half hours reflecting with your Key Changes Journal Template. Jot down what restored you most this week and how you can protect a small version of it once school starts again.