Why October is So Hard for Teachers (and What Actually Helps)

Somewhere around week six things start to shift in most buildings.

Nobody announces it. The bulletin boards are still bright, and the seating chart still mostly works. But the September energy (new pens, new kids, new plans) is gone, and what’s left is the actual job. Every day. With a stack of ungraded work riding shotgun on the drive home.

If that’s where you are right now, you’re not imagining it, and you’re not the only one.

Where the idea comes from

Back in 1990, Ellen Moir of the New Teacher Center sketched out what she called the phases of first-year teaching. Anticipation in August. Survival in September. Then, usually somewhere in October, a dip she named the disillusionment phase. As she puts it in a 2015 NPR story: six or seven weeks in, new teachers start to see how hard it really is to teach well. Morale drops. Things pick back up after winter break.

Roxanna Elden, a veteran teacher in Miami, gave it a less polite name: DEVOLSON. The Dark, Evil Vortex of Late September, October, and November.

Moir’s model came from years of mentoring new teachers, not from a controlled study, and it was built to describe the first year. Nobody has proven that a 20-year veteran follows the same curve.

But I’ve done 28 Octobers. I know what week seven feels like, and I don’t think it’s only rookies who feel it.

Some of your students have been trying so hard to keep it together that they start running out of steam. You realize that some of the challenges that are in your classroom will be there all year no matter what you do. And you’ve already worked so hard yet you know there is so much work left to do. These are things I feel every year around this time.

Why this stretch feels so heavy

The novelty is gone, but the workload isn’t. The first round of real assessments lands all at once. Quarter grades are due. Conferences are coming. The kids have settled in enough to show you who they really are, which is wonderful and also a lot.

Some of it is light. Up here in Northern Wisconsin, I’m leaving the house in the dark already, and once the clocks fall back on November 1, I’ll be driving home in it too. Less daylight means less time outside, less movement, and a body that wants to hibernate right when the job wants more.

And some of it is the gap. In August we picture the year we’re going to have. By October, we’re living the year we actually have. That gap stings, especially for teachers who care a lot. (Which is most of you, or you wouldn’t be reading a teacher blog on a weeknight.)

The lake turns over

Every fall, the lakes up here do something strange. As the surface water cools, it gets heavy enough to sink, and the whole lake mixes top to bottom. For a while, the water can look murky. Stirred up. If you didn’t know better, you’d think something had gone wrong.

Nothing has. It’s called fall turnover, and it’s how the lake gets oxygen to the bottom before ice-up. The murk is part of getting ready for winter.

October in a classroom feels a lot like that. Everything you brought in August is getting mixed with everything the year actually handed you. It’s messy for a few weeks. That doesn’t mean you’re bad at this, and it doesn’t mean the year is broken.

Here are a few things that help. Count what’s working before you fix what isn’t. A two-minute list of three things that went right this week sounds soft, but it pushes back on the brain’s habit of grabbing the bad stuff and letting the good slide past. Drop something. A lesson you were going to rewrite a third time, or the guilt about the stack (it will still be a stack on Monday, and so will you).

Get outside while it’s light, even fifteen minutes at lunch. I’ll take a short ruck around the block over another hour at my desk most days, because movement and daylight do more for my mood in November than anything I can buy.

And find one person. Moir’s whole point was that new teachers make it through this phase better with someone walking alongside them, and the research on mentoring backs her up. I don’t think that changes at year 28. Send one text to a colleague this week. Not about work. Just how are you actually doing?

The lake clears. It always does.

If you want one small practice a week to lean on through the long middle of fall, the Fall Pack of A Year of STRONG Practices is free for newsletter subscribers. Week 13, “Letting the Leaves Fall,” is built for exactly this stretch. Subscribe here and you’ll find it waiting.

P.S. If this helped you this week, you can buy me a coffee on Ko-fi. It keeps Why Edify going.