Kelli and I still enjoy going to happy hours with former teachers and colleagues. There is something comfortable about those gatherings — the easy laughter, the familiar stories, the way old connections seem to pick up right where they left off.
And, as usually happens when teachers get together, the conversation eventually turns back to school.
People talk about what is happening in their classrooms, their buildings, and their districts. They share the funny moments, the frustrations, the new policies, the students who are wearing them out, and the students who are quietly breaking their hearts in the best possible way.
What never ceases to amaze me is how familiar those conversations still feel.
Kelli and I will find ourselves driving home afterward, remembering other May gatherings from years ago, when we were the ones still in the middle of the year-end rush. Different names. Different classrooms. Different buildings, maybe.
But the emotional rhythm is remarkably similar.
By May, teachers are tired. Deeply tired.
And yet, as they talk, you can still hear the affection underneath it all — affection for their students, for their colleagues, for the strange and meaningful work of helping young people grow.
That mix has always stayed with me.
The exhaustion is real.
So is the gratitude.
There is a strange emotional weather that settles over schools in May.
It is not simply exhaustion, though there is plenty of that. By this point in the year, most teachers are running on a thin margin of energy. The calendar is crowded, the routines are beginning to fray, the testing windows have left their mark, and the ordinary patience that came more naturally in October may take a little more searching now.
But it is not only exhaustion.
That is what makes May so complicated.
Alongside the fatigue, there is often a tenderness teachers may not have expected. A student who struggled all year finally turns in something honest and thoughtful. A class that once felt scattered suddenly begins to feel like a small community. A quiet student lingers after class just long enough to say thank you, or maybe says nothing at all but gives you that look that tells you something landed.
And there it is.
You are tired.
And you are grateful.
Not one or the other, but both.
That is one of the hidden truths of teaching. The work can wear you down and still matter deeply. You can feel ready for the year to end and still feel a lump in your throat when it does. You can count the days until summer and still find yourself unexpectedly sad when a familiar group of students walks out the door for the last time.
May asks teachers to hold more than one truth at once.
And that is not weakness.
It may be one of the quieter forms of wisdom.
The Emotional Complexity of Closing a Year
I sometimes think people outside of education misunderstand the end of the school year. From a distance, it can look as though teachers are simply coasting toward summer, winding things down, tying up a few loose ends, and waiting for the final bell.
But anyone who has lived inside a school knows better.
May is not a gentle slide into rest. It is often one of the most emotionally crowded months of the year.
There are exams, grades, field trips, ceremonies, assemblies, paperwork, meetings, parent questions, student worries, and all the small interruptions that seem to multiply just when everyone’s energy is lowest. There are students who are excited, students who are anxious, students who are acting out because transitions are hard, and students who suddenly seem to realize the year is almost over and are not quite ready to let it go.
One teacher voice I keep thinking about said it this way:
“I give the kids my all, then I have no energy left for myself, but I push myself and show up.”
That sentence carries a lot of truth.
It names the devotion, but it also names the cost. And May has a way of making both visible.
Teachers are managing the visible work of closing a year while also doing their own quiet accounting.
- Did I reach them?
- Did I do enough?
- Did they grow?
- Did I miss something?
- Will they remember anything that mattered?
Those questions rarely show up in a formal evaluation, but they live inside the teacher’s heart. They rise in the car on the way home. They show up while entering grades. They sit quietly beside you when the room is finally empty.
One line from that same kind of reflection keeps returning to me:
“The year is ending… but the questions are just beginning.”
That feels true to me.
Because May does not simply close the year. It opens up the remembering.
And then, just when the fatigue feels heaviest, gratitude enters the room.
Not the loud kind. Not the sentimental kind that turns teaching into a movie ending.
A quieter kind.
Gratitude for the student who finally trusted you. Gratitude for the class that made you laugh even on hard days. Gratitude for the colleague who understood without needing a long explanation. Gratitude for the little signs that growth was happening, even when you could not always see it clearly.
May is full of endings, but it is also full of evidence.
Not always measurable evidence.
Human evidence.
Why Two Feelings Can Be True at Once
Psychologists sometimes talk about mixed emotions, those moments when seemingly opposite feelings exist side by side. We often think emotions should arrive neatly, one at a time, but real life is rarely that tidy. Important seasons often carry more than one feeling.
A graduation can bring pride and sadness.
A child leaving home can bring relief and grief.
Retirement can bring freedom and disorientation.
And the end of a school year can bring exhaustion and gratitude.
In fact, the presence of both feelings may be a sign that something has mattered. We do not usually feel emotionally complicated about things that mean nothing to us.
Complexity often appears where attachment has formed.
That is one reason May can feel so strange for teachers.
The fatigue is real because the work has been demanding.
The gratitude is real because the relationships have been real.
A teacher may be worn down by the pace of the year and still deeply moved by the students in front of them. Those feelings do not cancel each other out. They belong together.
Maybe that is one of the deeper lessons May offers us: the human heart is spacious enough to hold both weariness and love.
The Students We Carry With Us
Every teacher has students who stay with them.
Some stay because they were joyful. Some stay because they were difficult. Some stay because they changed in front of us. Some stay because we wish we had known how to help them better.
After enough years in education, you begin to realize that teaching leaves traces both ways. We hope we leave something good in the lives of our students, but they also leave something in us.
A phrase.
A face.
A moment at the door.
A note written in awkward handwriting.
A question asked years before we were ready to answer it.
A student who came back later and told us something we never knew at the time.
That is part of what makes May so tender. The year may be ending on the calendar, but relationships do not end quite so cleanly. We release students into summer, into the next grade, into graduation, into whatever comes next. But some part of them remains in the rooms of our memory.
Teachers know this, even if they do not always say it out loud.
We remember.
And sometimes, in May, the remembering begins before the year has even ended.
One of the lines we have used before says it simply:
“Teachers don’t just finish the year — they quietly measure it.”
They measure it in ways no spreadsheet can fully hold.
They measure it in conversations that almost happened too late. In students who softened over time. In the child who finally raised a hand. In the group that became a little kinder than it was in September. In the student who still struggled, but kept coming.
And sometimes teachers measure the year in what they wish had gone differently.
That, too, is part of the carrying.
Gratitude Without Pretending
It is important, though, not to use gratitude as a way of covering over exhaustion.
Teachers do not need one more person telling them to “just be grateful.” That kind of gratitude can become another burden, another way of asking teachers to smile through depletion.
Real gratitude is different.
Real gratitude does not deny fatigue. It sits beside it.
It says, “Yes, this year took a lot out of me.”
And then it says, “And still, there were moments of grace.”
That distinction matters.
A teacher can be grateful and need rest. A teacher can love students and need distance from the demands of school. A teacher can find meaning in the work and still recognize that the system often asks too much.
That connects closely to the question behind [What Teachers Need to Receive]: not whether teachers care enough, but whether the work gives anything back to the people who keep pouring themselves into it.
Another teacher voice captures this tension with painful honesty:
“I’m staying… but staying is costing me something.”
That is not cynicism.
It is a truthful sentence from someone still committed, but no longer willing to pretend that commitment comes without a price.
And maybe that is where May invites a deeper kind of honesty.
Not bitterness.
Not complaint for its own sake.
Honesty.
Because gratitude should never be used to make exhaustion more acceptable.
But it can help us notice that exhaustion is not the whole story.
There were students who grew. There were lessons that mattered. There were small kindnesses exchanged in hallways and classrooms. There were days when your presence steadied someone else, even if you did not know it at the time.
That does not erase the hard parts.
It simply refuses to let the hard parts have the final word.
A Spiritual Kind of Accounting
There is a line from Galatians that often comes to mind near the end of a school year: “Let us not grow weary in doing good.”
I used to hear that mostly as encouragement to keep going, and maybe it is. But now, with a little more age and a little more tenderness toward human limits, I hear something else in it too.
“Let us not grow weary” does not mean we never become tired.
Of course we do.
It means we should not let weariness convince us that the good was meaningless.
That feels especially important in May.
Because by this point in the year, teachers may not feel particularly inspiring. They may feel behind, scattered, impatient, and ready for quiet. They may remember what did not get done more easily than what did. They may see the gaps before they see the growth.
But spiritual wisdom often asks us to look again.
Not to deny reality.
To widen it.
Maybe the good was smaller than you hoped. Maybe it was quieter than you imagined. Maybe it did not show up in the form you expected. But it was there.
A little more confidence in one student.
A little more belonging in one classroom.
A little more courage in one child who had almost given up.
A little more patience than you thought you had.
This, too, counts.
And that may be the question teachers need most near the end of the year:
“What if you’ve done more than you think?”
Not everything.
Not perfectly.
Not without mistakes or missed moments.
But more than you think.
Letting May Be May
Perhaps the invitation is not to solve May.
Maybe the invitation is to let May be what it is.
Crowded.
Tender.
Messy.
Holy in small ways.
A month of tired teachers still showing up, still noticing, still caring, still helping students cross one more threshold.
There is no need to force the season into a neat emotional category. You do not have to choose between being exhausted and being thankful. You do not have to pretend you are energized when you are not. You do not have to apologize for feeling sadness at the end of something that took so much of your heart.
You can be ready for the year to end.
You can be grateful it happened.
You can need rest.
You can still love the work.
That strange mix is not a contradiction. It is part of the inner life of teaching.
And maybe, in its own quiet way, it is evidence that the year mattered.
Reflection Questions
As the school year moves toward its close, here are a few questions worth carrying gently:
- What part of this year made me tired in a way I need to honor?
- What part of this year am I genuinely grateful for?
- Which student, class, or moment will I carry with me longer than I expected?
- Where did growth happen quietly, without much attention?
- What would it mean to let myself end the year with honesty instead of judgment?
Closing
May does not ask teachers to feel one simple thing.
It asks them to hold the fullness of the year with open hands.
The weariness.
The affection.
The questions.
The gratitude.
And maybe, underneath all of it, the quiet truth that teaching still matters because human beings still matter.
Even when we are tired.
Maybe especially then.
