The Clean Slate of Summer

the grace of forgiveness

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Photo by Tessa Rampersad on Unsplash

It’s finally summer vacation, and I am free of the weight of teaching. My creative side can bloom again.

I’ve learned that my creative soul has weather and seasons, and maybe yours does, too. Sometimes it pours, sometimes it peeks through the clouds, and sometimes it’s a drought. For the past few months, I’ve been hibernating in a season of reading to replenish the well, so to speak.

This week, I’ve been writing up a storm while overlooking the abundance in my garden after so much rain this year. My roses and hydrangeas are having a banner year!

It is so glorious to create in this environment without the threat of tomorrow’s class schedule, grading hundreds of assignments, and society’s fucked up anti-intellectual values looming like a hurricane I must push through each day.

I’ve been teaching since 1999. It was supposed to be temporary until my writing career took off. Yikes, if that’s not sobering. But with that many years in an ever-changing classroom environment, from overhead projectors to Smart screens to AI ready to steal our critical thinking skills, one thing has stayed the same.

Students need good teachers.

(*Time to reflect and then pretend I’m not a fucking teacher for the rest of summer*)

Photo by Seema Miah on Unsplash

Out of my eight high school English classes, one was the worst. Like really bad. Some days I couldn’t even start the lesson because students walked into class screaming at the top of their lungs at each other, and I had to get security before a riot began. Other days they’d be asleep or skipping class and roaming the hallways, and I’d have to stop teaching to fill out paperwork for administrative discipline.

How did I get through it?

Clean slate.

A little trick I learned many years ago. Before a really difficult class, I take a bunch of deep breaths, get really calm, and repeat “clean slate” a few times as I visualize washing away any negative emotional clutter I accumulated after working with them. It gives myself the luxury of forgiveness for any teaching mistakes or shortcomings, and it resets my heart to treat every student as if yesterday’s behavior didn’t affect today. It provides space to make different choices, and if they do, I make sure to notice. Not easy, but effective enough to maintain my sanity.

One day in that awful class, a girl asked me, “You have kids, right?”

Unsure where this was going, I said, “Yes, I have two daughters—remember I mentioned them before? They’re in their 20s now.”

She took one long look at me, sizing me up, and in all seriousness, she said, “I wish you were my mom.”

And then the girl next to her said, “Me, too.”

And the class went utterly silent.

It was a moment that made me pause and question all of my inner judgments about that class, and all future classes moving forward. I had been feeling like I was drowning and failing and insignificant in that room, while students saw me as a consistent role model who they could trust.

Damn. I earned this vacation.

Okay, no more teacher talk for the rest of summer :)

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In the garden, the clean slate mindset also applies. It’s the first year I get to move plants around that have overgrown their spaces. So what if I made a decision in the past, and planted something in the wrong spot? I don’t have to live with past decisions that aren’t working. I always have the choice to start again.

As an author, I’m back to writing full-time for the next few months, and I’m giving my creativity the clean slate treatment as well, coming fresh to the page without internal baggage. So what if I overestimated a project’s deadline? So what if I tabled a project, and now I like it again? When we internally beat ourselves up for our past habits and mistakes, we perpetuate that energy moving forward.

What if we cleared the desk, cleared the mental clutter, and gave ourselves the grace of today with no past mistakes, no inner judgments, no baggage, only you and the present moment?

Forgiveness leads to breakthrough.

Happy summer!

(*disclaimer: clean slate is not for abusive situations, in or out of the classroom.)