The Soft Skills of Survival Teaching

Or: what July trains you for, whether you like it or not

July teaching has a reputation problem. It’s often framed as lighter, easier or (my personal favourite) not real teaching. Summer school. Camps. Cover classes. Half-empty groups. Students who arrive late, leave early, or emotionally check out somewhere around mid-June and never quite return… And yet.

If you are teaching in July, like, actually standing in front of students, trying to make something vaguely educational happen – you are operating with fewer resources, lower motivation, and significantly less emotional fuel than at almost any other point in the year. Which makes July teaching not a downgrade, but a stress test. What you practise in summer is not methodology but a set of survival-level teaching skills. They quietly carry you through the rest of the year when things stop going according to plan and are far more useful during the regular school year than most teachers realise.

Let’s talk about the inventory!

Industrial-Strength Patience

During the holidays, even if you’re technically off, many teachers still perform a strange cognitive balancing act. You’re resting, but not fully. Recovering, but not detached. Somewhere between a sun lounger and an internal monologue that says This cocktail menu would actually make a decent warm-up activity, should I write it down?

In this state, you practice a very particular kind of patience. Not the performative patience we like to brag about on LinkedIn. The serious, industrial-strength patience that lets you tolerate unfinished thoughts, accept low output without spiralling into yet another existential crisis, and resist the urge to fix everything immediately.

This is the same patience you later use in September, when systems aren’t working yet. Or in March, when everyone is exhausted and nobody is listening. Or during that admin meeting that could have been an email, but wasn’t (urgh…). And sure, July doesn’t invent this patience, but it forces you to rely on it without backup.

Radical Improvisation

Summer teaching is where lesson plans go to be humbled. The harsh reality is: half the class doesn’t show up, the activity you planned suddenly feels wrong, the group dynamic shifts mid-lesson, the projector refuses to cooperate because it also needs a holiday. So, you do the next best thing, and improvise.

You stretch one discussion into twenty minutes. You drop an activity and come up with a silly game. You let students talk longer because something interesting is actually happening for once. This isn’t chaos. This is professional judgment.

The same judgment you later use when you’re asked to cover for another teacher with 5 minutes’ notice, a fire drill eats half your lesson (sweet Cthulhu, I hate fire drills), or a quick substitution turns into a full teaching hour with zero context. And it is July that sharpens your ability to let go of the script and still land the lesson somewhere meaningful.

Emotional Regulation (aka The Skill Nobody Trained You For)

Summer classrooms are emotionally… challenging. Students are tired, you are tired, everyone is warm, irritable, and running on reduced tolerance. And yet, most of the time, you don’t escalate. You don’t push when it won’t work. You regulate – choose calm over control, humour over confrontation and distance over drama (I mean, sometimes).

This is the exact same skill you need during parent–teacher conferences or staffroom tensions during high-pressure months. July is here to make you smarter about where to spend your emotional energy.

Controlled Sarcasm

You know my approach: humour keeps my classrooms functional. Again – humour, and even if it’s specific, dry, controlled sarcasm that signals: I see what’s happening here, and I’m not panicking, it’s neither cruelty nor bitterness. I believe that in summer sarcasm becomes a survival tool. It diffuses tension. It builds rapport without oversharing. Used well, it’s one of the most sophisticated classroom management tools there is, and one that works just as effectively in bloody March as it does in July.

The Art of the Minimum Viable Lesson

July teaches you to ask an essential question: What is the minimum this lesson needs to be… still a lesson? You know, pedagogically legitimate class, not a WOW factor. And so you prioritise outcomes over optics by trimming content (off with this worksheet!) and finally accepting that not every lesson needs to sparkle. And in doing so, you avoid burning yourself out. Now, this skill is invaluable for teachers, especially during exam weeks or those days when “doing less” is the only reason anything gets done at all.

This isn’t lowering standards, darling, it’s actually setting them.

Why These Skills Matter All Year

We all know that most teaching happens under imperfect conditions, and July just makes that visible. If you can teach when motivation is low, energy is limited, attendance is unpredictable, and expectations are unclear, you already have the skills required for the rest of the year. You simply don’t always trust them when you should.

Which brings us to lesson planning.

Ten Lesson Ideas That Respect Summer Reality

Summer teaching doesn’t need more inspiration. It needs less pressure. Below are my oldie-but-goodie lesson ideas that work precisely because they align with the skills you’re already using in July: improvisation, flexibility, emotional awareness, and minimum viable planning. Also, they don’t demand enthusiasm you don’t have:

• Ridiculous Summer Lesson Ideas (That Actually Work): embracing the absurd is sometimes the most appropriate pedagogical move
• Storytelling Activities for EFL Classes: flexible, scalable, and resilient when plans fall apart
• No-Prep Storytelling Lessons: for Mondays and other days when your brain is on energy-saving mode
• Summer Songs and Stories: slower pace, lower cognitive load, surprisingly effective
• Aliens vs Humans: imaginative enough to engage, simple enough to survive
• Responsibility vs Spontaneity: a somewhat philosophical summer lesson that meets students where they are
• Let’s Travel with Google Earth: exploratory, visual, and easy to abandon mid-way if needed
• Exact Instructions Challenge: structured chaos with a clear payoff
• The Colors of Evil: short, funny, and emotionally light
• Kitbull by Pixar: emotionally rich without exhausting the teacher

Each of these lessons works not despite summer conditions, but because of them.

A Final Thought (Before You Pretend Not to Think About School)

If you’re teaching in July, or even just thinking like a teacher during the holidays – you’re not failing at rest. You’re exercising a set of professional skills that don’t get named often enough. The trick isn’t to switch them off in September. It’s to trust them sooner.

July teaching isn’t lesser teaching. It’s survival teaching. And survival, as it turns out, is a highly transferable skill.

Good luck!