In the teaching world, there is a very well-known phenomenon called the “Sunday Scaries” that most of us feel the Sunday before a new school week starts. For me, when this does pop up, I feel it in the evening the day before a new school week, hence why I’m writing on this Monday evening.

I’m sure this is something that many may feel as their work weeks approach, but if you’re unfamiliar, the “Sunday Scaries” is the anxiety of the approaching work week, the stress you might encounter because of workload or environment, and how jarring it is from going from a weekend where you have much more freedom to choose what you do to a week where you’re often expected to be at a certain place at a certain time doing a certain thing.

Sunday Scaries have always been pretty confusing for me, because I guess I’ve always equated the feeling with not enjoying your job. At this point in my career, though, I can pretty confidently say that teaching music to people from ages 4-14 is one of the greatest joys of my life, and getting to do it as a job every day still feels like a dream to me. When I wake up in the morning, I look forward to seeing all my students and experiencing all that I will in the course of a day making music with them. Why, then, have I felt these Sunday Scaries on and off? Shouldn’t I feel excited the night before a week of doing something that is so fulfilling and meaningful to me?

At some point this weekend, it hit me that Sunday Scaries for me (and maybe for many) have less to do with not wanting to go to work because I don’t enjoy my job, and more because our jobs as teachers are quite unpredictable. You can do your best to plan lessons and activities that engage the students and adapt to various learning styles, build visuals and find manipulatives for students to use as resources while completing schoolwork, schedule your day so that you you know what time you have to begin packing the students up in order to line up to go to a class bathroom break and still make it to your essentials class at your scheduled time, and figure out exactly what you need to accomplish during your planning time in order to be prepared for teaching the next day. None of this accounts for the variability that 30 smaller humans and 40 adult humans bring into the picture. You never know if a student is going to be having a tough day and therefore contribute to you not being able to get through your lesson that you thoughtfully planned, or if they’re having such a tough day that they’re unsafe for themselves or around others, which you then have to respond to in real time. You don’t have any idea if a fire drill is going to happen during your prep time and make it so that you have to spend extra time after work to ensure you’re prepared for the following day. We never know if the internet will be down or slow, or if technology (ours and/or the students’) will be working or not working as we had counted on and planned for. You have no clue if a coworker will say something that brings up feelings in you right before you’re about to be in front of students again, or if you’ll find out in a staff meeting that more is expected of you that you weren’t accounting for when making your already full to-do list. These are just a few examples of the unpredictability of a school week, but I think this is truly the root of the Sunday Scaries — we never really know what’s coming in the week ahead because there are so many other humans and factors in a school building outside of our control.

This brings me to what I’m beginning to work on as a way of combatting these Sunday Scaries, because I refuse to accept that this will just be a part of teaching forever. First, I believe there is a real need to accept and acknowledge the feelings of nervousness, uncertainty, and lack of control before anything else can really be done. Like I mentioned, I think I have pushed these feelings away in the past because I thought that these couldn’t exist alongside the feelings of loving what I do, which not only didn’t eliminate the Sunday Scaries, but made them louder. I am seeing that these two feelings can be true at the same time — I am nervous about the week to come, and so excited to be with these students making music and experiencing what blossoms from their creativity.

After acknowledging the nervousness, I’ve started to ask myself: is there anything that could happen this week that I couldn’t handle? I really think the answer is no, because although I don’t have control over external circumstances this week, I do have control over my internal circumstances. In a situation where a student is having a tough day and the lesson gets interrupted for the class, or even in a situation where a student becomes unsafe, I know I’m capable of adapting to the situation with kindness and empathy for the struggling student and later making space for my own possible frustration that others couldn’t learn in ways they may have wanted to and disappointment that I spent time planning this lesson that I didn’t feel was fully able to land in the way I had played out in my mind. Maybe the opportunity to reach towards this student creates a closer bond with them because they know that they just chose something that you wouldn’t have chosen, but you’re showing them acceptance and understanding anyway. Maybe it would take 20 times of accepting that student after a situation like that before they really started to trust you. Maybe it never happens. Whatever the case, I know I have the tools to give myself that space to feel everything, no matter the outcome.

If a fire drill interrupts my planning, I know I can feel upset while also weighing my options of finishing what I was doing at a later time or just letting something go that was on my to-do list. I love this way of thinking about things, because sometimes I do choose to do less because of time-constraints, and I get the opportunity to see that everything still actually turned out okay and I was doing more than I really needed to. Maybe I do less and it turns out to be more stressful in one way or another — still, I can feel these feelings of stress and panic, know that they’re temporary, and choose differently next time.

Maybe technology is slow or not functional, and you get the chance to use your own creativity to reinvent the lesson for the students in some way that still teaches what the learning target was for that day. Even better, the students get to use their creativity and help you figure out how this lesson will still happen (after you answer their pleas of, “But can’t we just have a free day today?!”). Who knows? You might even get to see that when students have the opportunity to design their own learning in this way, you discover something you hadn’t known about something that works for your students. Or, maybe you try to teach the lesson and it’s a total disaster, the students are more confused than before the lesson started, and you’re about to ban anyone from saying your last name or even talking to you for the next hour. Still, you can work to have the tools to breathe, ground, regulate in that moment, choose what to do next, and let those feelings pass as the time passes.

I could go on and on with these scenarios, but the specifics really don’t matter as much as the idea. Recognizing and feeling the feelings, choosing in each moment based on the feelings, learning something from the outcome, rinse and repeat. There’s only so much we can plan for in such an unpredictable job, but honestly, part of the joy I get from teaching is that each day is different, each person is different, and things often come together in such unexpected and inspiring ways. And when they don’t, I know I am (and you are, too) capable of taking a deep breath, feeling it through, and seeing what will happen next.