On the summer, finally
There is a specific moment at the end of the academic year that no amount of professional composure can fully conceal.
The last student has submitted. The final grade has been entered. The inbox, which has spent the better part of nine months in a state of low-grade emergency, goes quiet. And somewhere between closing the laptop and opening something cold, a thought arrives with the particular clarity that only exhaustion can produce.
I need to lie down for approximately three weeks. This is not a complaint. It is a medical observation.
Teaching is one of those professions that people outside it tend to underestimate in a specific way. Not the difficulty of it, most people will concede, if pressed, that standing in front of a room and making something complex legible is not easy. What gets underestimated is the residue. The way the work follows you home. The brief you are mentally rewriting on a Sunday evening. The student feedback you are turning over in your head at eleven at night, not because anything went wrong, but because something almost worked and you want to understand why it didn't.
Design adds another layer to this. Because the field moves constantly, keeping up with it is not a task that gets completed. It is a condition of the job. The new tool was released in February. The methodology has quietly shifted since the last time you taught it. The industry conversation that is happening on LinkedIn and in studios, which you need to have an informed opinion about by October.
The summer, then, is not simply a break. It is a form of maintenance.
What I have learned, over more summers than I will admit to, is that the first week does not count. The first week is depressurisation. It looks like rest, but it is not quite rest yet; it is the body catching up with the decision to stop. You sleep more than usual. You start sentences and forget where they were going. You pick up a book you have been meaning to read since January and find that the words are moving slightly.
This is normal. This is necessary. Do not fight it.
The second week is better. Something returns, not energy exactly, but attention. The particular quality of noticing that gets depleted across an academic year begins to refill. You start seeing things again. The light on a surface. The way a menu is laid out in a restaurant and why it is slightly wrong. The poster in the ferry terminal is almost good and would have been, with one different decision. Designers do not stop working on holiday.
We just stop having to do anything about it. This is, it turns out, its own kind of pleasure.
The third week, and this is the part nobody warns you about, ideas start arriving. Unbidden, unscheduled, and with a timing that is frankly inconsiderate. In the water. On a walk. At a table somewhere with something good to eat and no particular reason to be thinking about curriculum design or workshop structure or the new brief you want to try in the autumn.
And yet. I have learned to keep something nearby to write in. Not to work genuinely, the work can wait, but because the ideas that arrive in the summer are different from the ones that arrive during the year. They are less pressured. They have had room to form properly before surfacing. They are often the best ones.
The summer does not switch off the thinking. It just finally gives the thinking enough space to become interesting again. There is a version of the teacher who returns in September exactly as they left in June, slightly tanned and fully recharged, ready to deliver the same year they have delivered before.
I am not that teacher, and I have stopped trying to be.
Every September, I come back with something slightly revised, a brief rethought, a session restructured, a question I want to ask differently. Not because what came before was wrong, but because the summer gave me enough distance to see it clearly. Distance, as I tell students repeatedly, is not time wasted. It is how the work becomes visible again. The irony of spending the summer thinking about teaching while ostensibly not teaching is not lost on me.
But here we are. The laptop is closed. The sea is right there. The brief can wait until September. For now, this is enough.
