Today’s post marks the beginning of the seventh year of my Rewrite Newsletter, and over the last couple weeks I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on why I started it in the first place. While I have always been a writer, for much of the first five years of my teaching career, I took a writing hiatus because there simply wasn’t time. Instead, I worked 60 or 70 hours a week in the pursuit of being a great teacher through sheer will and hours spent at my desk.

The end result of burning the candle at every possible end was predictable: Despite my love of nearly all things teaching, I left the classroom due to burnout after my fifth year—only returning when I couldn’t come up with another idea for what I wanted to do instead. 

The second five years of my career were defined by a new approach—that of working smarter, not harder. I did this through researching effective and efficient pedagogical practices and then writing about them because like Flannery O’Connor I generally don’t know what I think until I read what I say. 

Then, six years ago, I moved my writing into the public sphere, first through social media and then through this newsletter. At the time I didn’t think much about readership or writing books; I just wanted to further refine my thinking by putting it into the wider world and, if I was lucky, maybe help out a few colleagues by sharing what I’d learned.

And the rest is, if not history, readily available in the archives of my blog.

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I tell this story because, as I mentioned in my post about the Fresh Start Effect, each new temporal landmark (essentially a fresh start like a new school year or new job) offers a rare opportunity where our brains open to breaking out of old patterns and changing our behavior in meaningful ways. And as I looked towards this new year, I suddenly realized something about my recent posts that I hadn’t noticed before.

In my eleven years of writing about education, most of my public and personal scrawlings have revolved around a single core theme: How to make the only job that has ever fit me—one that is so beautiful and essential and yet nudges us ceaselessly towards overwork and martyrdom—fit with the balanced life I want for myself. 

But since 2020, my writing—and most writing about education—has had a different focus. That of making it through an emergency. How to manage the crises we are facing. 

I think this crises-management approach, both for me and others, generally made a lot of sense. There were (and are) so many emergencies, ranging from a pandemic to a decline in teen mental health to the rise of AI that can pass the Bar exam. I also want to be clear that as I type these words, most of these emergencies and their very real repercussions remain. But as humans we can’t stay in emergency mode forever. Emergencies are exhausting (and too many teachers are already leaving) and when we are in an emergency, our brain (or our collective brains) tends towards four options: fight, flight, freeze, or appease. These options aren’t bad when one is in a momentary tight spot, but they aren’t great when trying to construct strong, thoughtful, enduring responses to complicated problems.

So this year, even though the emergencies and problems of the 2020s remain, I plan to take the newsletter back to something closer to my pre-2020 search for clarity around how we can do our jobs better and in less time (because hours worked by teachers also ballooned to even more unsustainable levels in the last three years). Of course, there will still be commentary on current events and new concepts and discoveries, but the focus will return to how to squeeze this oversized job into an 8-4 box, pare the firehose of new research and practices we encounter into a manageable stream, and how to do it all well despite the dizzyingly difficulty of engaging and effectively teaching 150 different young people.

Specifically, I plan to do this by revising and updating the ten posts from my last six years that had the biggest effect on helping others and myself to do the job better and faster. This starts next week with a look into my gradebook and how my “grade-less” journey stands five years in.

Until next week, wishing you a wonderful last few days of summer or first few days of the year. Thanks, as always, for reading and happy Friday!

Yours in teaching,

Matt

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