End of term. What the last week before Christmas reveals.

The last week of term before Christmas is the week when the accumulated learning of a whole term settles. Not academically — I mean socially and emotionally. The friendships that were difficult in September have usually resolved, one way or another, by December. The teacher the child wasn't sure about has become known. The routines that felt strange in the first week have become automatic. The child at the end of term is a different person from the child who walked in at the beginning of September, and most of the difference is invisible — it happened in the daily micro-adjustments of being somewhere consistently, with the same people, navigating the same structures.

The tiredness at the end of term is real and it's not only physical. It's the tiredness of sustained social effort, of having managed the complexity of group belonging for sixteen weeks, of having held yourself together in an environment that requires constant calibration to others. Children who can name this kind of tiredness — who have the language for 'I'm tired from being around people, not tired from not sleeping' — are developing something important: the capacity to distinguish between different kinds of depletion, which is the beginning of knowing how to restore yourself.