How to Stay in Love with Teaching English (Even When You’re Tired)
Your joy matters. And your students can feel when it’s real.
There’s a difference between teaching from love and teaching from obligation. You can do both. Most of us do. Sometimes in the same hour.
We show up, grade and make the same comments again and again, rewrite the lessons over and over. And we mean it—we care. But sometimes, that care gets buried under paperwork, pressure, or the quiet grief of doing work that once felt magical and now feels flat. Or work that you had the highest of expectations for and was much, much harder than you could have imagined.
If you’ve been there, you’re not alone.
This is a post about finding your way back to the part of teaching that feels alive. Not the part that gets evaluated or judged. The part that makes this work feel like good-hard, rather than bad/terrible/exhausting/overwhelming/etc./etc./etc.—hard.
1. Start with what you love. Really.
There’s something sacred about teaching a book you genuinely love. Your tone shifts. Your body language softens. Your excitement is palpable and shines onto the students. Students notice—even if they don’t name it. And, they love it!
I love to teach Red Rising by Pierce Brown because I’m obsessed with the whole series. I want to talk about it, unpack the big metaphors, and argue over character choices. I love teaching World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil because it helped me find stillness at a time when I needed it and inspires me as a writer more than anything I’ve read in the past decade. I teach Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn because it’s set one town over from where I grew up, and every time I open it, I get to bring a piece of my home into the room.
These are not texts that were handed to me with a pacing guide and a test. They’re texts that keep teaching me things. And I really, really want to share them.
You don’t need permission to bring in something you care about. You just need the curiosity to follow your own thread of interest—and the trust that students will come with you.
2. Read for yourself. Even if it’s just a little.
There’s a kind of exhaustion that creeps in when you’re surrounded by words but never reading anything for yourself. When everything you read is for school, even the most beautiful sentence starts to feel like work.
So I read something that’s just mine. A novel. A podcast. A poem. Something I won’t write a lesson on. Something that lets me remember how it feels to get pulled under by a story and not resurface for hours.
Even if it’s a chapter a week, it’s enough. It’s not about productivity—it’s about staying in touch with that part of you that’s still a reader, still open.
My biggest tip? Get an e-reader. Even if you vowed to NEVER get an e-reader, you love the smell of books, you like the tactile experience of pages, etc. Trust me on this one, it’s actually amazing.
3. Create sacred space for stillness and curiosity.
So much of teaching is noise—bells, questions, emails, rubrics. And in all of that motion, it’s easy to forget that part of the magic of literature is what it quietly opens up.
Stillness is a gift we don’t give enough. But in my classroom, I’ve loved to carve out time that feels different from the rest of the day.
Time where we:
Read silently, and I read too.
Listen to a podcast episode and just sit with it—no worksheet, no follow-up.
Write before we speak.
Read outside, just because the weather is good and a breeze belongs in the classroom too.
Stillness doesn’t mean nothing is happening. It means something is settling. And in that quiet, I find myself falling back in love with the work. (And resetting my nervous system, bc noise? Yikes…)
4. Bring creativity back into the room.
It’s easy to default to what’s familiar. Essays. Graphic organizers. Timed writes. And sometimes those are what we need. But when the days start to blur together, I know it’s time to shake something loose.
That usually means offering a different kind of invitation:
a fan fiction piece
a visual collage
a podcast-style response
a performance or presentation
a wild idea that a student had and I said yes to
I have two free sets of project ideas if you need a place to start:
When students are lit up, I feel it too. And when their responses surprise me, it reminds me that this subject can still be a space for discovery—for all of us.
5. Make room for connection.
Students don’t need polished performances from us. They need presence.
They need to know we’re human. That we remember what it’s like to be sixteen and lost and figuring it out. That we still read for pleasure. That we once fell in love with books and that love has changed, just like they have.
One of my favorite ways to open the year is by sharing my own reading history—the good, the complicated, the books I read in secret because I was told not to. I ask students to write and share theirs too. Some say, “I used to love reading… until middle school.” Some say they never liked it. Some say very little, but I can tell they’re listening differently afterward.
That kind of connection makes the rest of the year smoother. Not easier, maybe. But more honest.
If this speaks to you, I wrote more about it a post on Creating True Connection in the Classroom.
You deserve to love what you teach.
Not every day. Not every text. Not every minute.
But enough.
Enough to feel that small flutter when a class discussion takes off. Enough to smile when a student writes something real. Enough to remember that teaching English is not just a job—it’s a practice. And practices need tending.
You’re allowed to design a classroom that feels good to walk into. You’re allowed to follow your joy. You’re allowed to change your mind.
And most of all—you’re allowed to stay in love with this work.
Even when you’re tired.