You’ve seen the look.
The slightly crazed eyes. The shaky fingers gripping an impossibly large tumbler of Diet Coke. The creative interpretation of what can pass as “business casual”. The frazzled hair pulled into a nape-of-the-neck messy bun day after day. A desk littered with papers, drink bottles, and sticky notes in a rainbow of colors. A laptop with 18 tabs minimum open at all times. A certain air that says, “I’m 10 seconds from losing it, so unless you brought me a family size bag of Lays salt and vinegar chips, you can see yourself out of my classroom.”
Listen. It’s rough out here as a teacher.
But teaching can also be fun, rewarding, and challenging in all kinds of good ways.
I think the key is knowing how to take care of yourself. And no, I’m not talking about “self care” bubble baths and facials. In 5 years of teaching, I’ve started to get a grasp on what really makes this career sustainable. It sure isn’t the system or the salary, so what is it?
First: Learn to say “no.”
People who choose to become teachers tend to be people-pleasers and go-getters. We want to help others. We want to do our best. We LOVE school, which says a lot about us right there. These can be valuable qualities, but they also encourage us to accept opportunities we don’t actually have time or energy for.
A few examples: optional trainings, extra certifications, coaching, clubs, chaperoning, field trips, presenting at professional development meetings, fabulous extension projects, escape rooms, and whatever other fun things you see teachers doing on TikTok.
Ask yourself: is this required for my job? Will I get paid more if I do it?
If the answer to both of those questions is “no,” then my answer is pretty much always “no.” Even things you get paid extra for are debatable–it’s up to you to determine how much your time is worth.
Second: Set a time boundary.
This goes hand in hand with learning to say “no,” because knowing your time limit helps you decide whether you can fit something in your schedule. More importantly, having a time limit makes you say “no” more often because you know extra things won’t fit in your schedule. If you are committed to leaving school at 4:00 pm, then you don’t have time to set up your center rotation activity for tomorrow’s class and make a presentation about differentiation through technology for next week’s PD.
Let’s say you are required to present at that PD, so it’s not that simple of a choice. In that case, maybe you scrap the center rotation that you haven’t even started (except for visualizing it in your half-lucid state between waking and sleeping last night). Maybe you find a National Geographic lesson on the same topic and use that instead. Maybe you ask a teacher you respect if they have a presentation you can recycle and alter slightly. Whatever you had envisioned may not come to pass if it can’t be done by 4:00.
And that. Is. Okay.
I understand that some things require passing the time limit, too. There are occasional emergencies: extreme behavior that has to be dealt with after school, for example, or hard and fast deadlines for end-of-quarter grades. Of course, these are necessary parts of teaching. However, for happy, well-rested, mentally/phsyically healthy teachers, these should be the exception rather than the norm.
Third: Leave work at work.
Once you leave school at 4:00, or whatever your cutoff time is, rip off that lanyard and forget grading. If you spend your whole evening, weekend, or winter break grading and planning, you’re missing a valuable opportunity for rejuvenation. If teaching weren’t so dang exhausting all the time, it would be the most leisurely career in the world–we have a lot of time off. But we have so much time off because we NEED IT. So use it! Again, if you’re not getting paid extra for something, just say “no.” Most things can wait.
Also, keep in mind that sick days are for mental health too.
Fourth: Embrace the chaos.
One of my challenges my first year was how scattered I felt. There was so much going on all the time and I felt like I needed to be in control of it. The fact is, you’re never going to be in control of everything. So many of the things I have witnessed could never have been predicted. (Physical altercations over dragons, a spider derailing an entire lesson, random interruptions by a Bollywood song,, you get the gist).
It’s important to have systems and routines to simplify things in your class, but it’s also okay if things are constantly changing and moving. Sometimes what we interpret as chaotic disorganization is actually a process of figuring out what we want things to look like.
It’s okay to try something that completely backfires–we’ve all done it. There are worse things than a noisy classroom with kids who enjoy talking to one another. Most students won’t notice if you assign something only to decide it’s not worth grading. And it’s worth it to have kids help move desks into their new arrangement, even if they aren’t as precise as you would like.
Take pictures of assignments gone terribly wrong, write down unexpected things people say, and laugh at the chaotic messes you create by not predicting the massively creative minds of children.
Even if you aren’t a first-year teacher, or a teacher at all, try it out. Each of these principles have helped me find joy in teaching (and life in general). That’s what I hope for all the new teachers out there. We’re in this together, my friends.
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