Come mid-August each year, there’s a certain sensation of absolute disgust that trickles in one’s throat. An alarm set for the ungodly hour of 5:30 A.M. Pumpkin Spice Lattes. The first homeroom bell of the school year. Yet another month maximum of Pirates baseball. Sure, at first glance, these all suck. They’re painful, unsettling, eyeroll-inducing. But take a few moments and look beyond their excruciating, unpleasant facade, there’s more layered in this seasonal transition that meets the eye. Except for PSL, which is awful, layered with gross, topped with a big helping of foul. A new school year brings about a lot more than just another nine months of work, Hiller Hoagies, and a few steps closer to being a part of the real world, and for most, that tends to be forgotten. For teachers, it’s a whole different ballgame.

A new year can be a bit therapeutic. There’s something calming about getting back into a coffee routine with your coworkers each morning, catching up with each other’s lives or sharing thoughts on lesson plans for the week. Or reprogramming your body to be on the three minute bathroom break cycle, because doing that outside of a school is just weird and needs justification. Or simply having a calming sigh of relief being immersed by rockets, Shakespeare, globes, or whatever else makes the heart sing.

It’s also exciting. A new school year is a new way to do things. That can be a different way to do vocabulary, or a new daily warm-up procedure, or an opportunity to really shake up the curriculum and implement new activities learned from trainings or colleagues or random ideas. It could be that you know the group of kids in your class this year are going to be a lot of fun, or perhaps for the first time in ever you don’t have cafeteria duty and won’t need to scrape a smorgasbord off your shoes every night.

The new year also brings about an abundance of hope – hope that perhaps a certain concept will only take one week to hammer down instead of the usual three, hope of being better each lesson and each day, and hope that the copiers will actually work when you need them to (and if they don’t, you’re not the one who breaks them). It’s every teacher’s hope that each student does well and each class is meaningful, and the start of every year forces this back into focus.

Yes, summer’s off to recharge is a nice perk of education, for all involved. But the reset of a new school year is much more meaningful. Having a chance to decompress for a weeks and then gear back up with new hopes, ideas, and plans makes it very reminiscent of a kid at Christmas: there’s so much enthusiasm that it’s hard to contain and stay focused when you want to do anything and everything new at once. So, students, if you are getting perhaps a bit bothered by your teacher’s high-energy in the first days of the new year and just can’t deal hearing over and over about this “awesome new thing we’re going to do this year,” consider where their mind is and that you can embrace the same mentality. Recognize the value in being excited for what a new year brings and the potential that is laying ahead.

And also remember that PSL is gross and unfortunately right around the corner.