This blog post is a long time coming. It’s a response to or a reflection on a series of different articles I’ve read over the past year*. I almost called this post “Confessions of a Recovering Workaholic.” Regardless of what I call this post, I want to share with you some of the struggles I’ve had in the past year. And I also want to share some of my future plans.
Last Year (The Final Year of My Martyrdom)
Last year and the first few weeks of this year are among the most difficult times I’ve experienced as a teacher. I have written about these circumstances before. Needless to say, as much as I try to be a grateful teacher, at times this mindset was extremely challenging. There were times when I definitely fell into teacher martyrdom, which Patricia at Blackboard Talk discusses and defines in this masterful post (which was also one of last year’s best posts). As a result, I ended up feeling like a dirty washcloth someone had wrung out so many times the fabric began to wear thin. It was a stretched, exhausted, joyless feeling.
And almost none of that feeling came from the classroom or students.
Instead, classroom and teaching time was the highlight of each day. The aridity came from everything else: endless paperwork, numbing meetings, and an incredibly hard winter.
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Some Realizations (A Martyr ‘s Epiphany)
By the end of last year, I realized that teacher martyrdom was dangerous. I mean, after all, religious martyrs die in their devotion. I love my job, but I don’t want to die in my classroom.
And that’s when I realized I have a choice. I can choose healthy. I can choose happy. And I can choose sustainability.
I can choose to lead a sustainable life rather than one that leads to burning at the stake.
Let’s be clear: I am not a mercilessly positive person. I still have rough days. Yes, I still complain sometimes. I still have to do paperwork and attend meetings. And I have no control over the looming winter weather.
There are also days when I have to make sacrifices to my job. However, unlike a martyr, I have just realized that I am not willing to sacrifice everything. And, really, no one was asking me to give up so much. That was pressure I was putting on myself.
Strategies to Stay Off the Stake
As a recovering teacher martyr, I back slide sometimes. I am not perfect, and the pursuit of perfection is something I am consistently working against. However, these are some of the strategies I have been employing to help me stave off the urge to martyr myself in the name of public education.
- Email Control: I no longer have school email on my cell phone. If I really need to access school email on my device, I can go through the browser, but that’s a tedious process because I also will not let my personal device remember any of my school passwords. I want to make it as hard as possible for me to access work email on my cell phone. Similarly, I’m working hard not to check school email after a certain time.
- Going Home: Another way I am using my phone for good is to keep alarms on my phone reminding me to go home. I have two alarms that nag me to go home. It’s not a perfect system–I can and have snoozed both alarms numerous times. However, the reminder to send myself home has been a boon to my mental health this year.
- The Ego Detector: I first read about the Ego Detector in this post from Dave Stuart Jr. Basically, the premise is that teachers only agree to those obligations they would consent to if no one was watching. This is how I have declined committee appointments, encouraged other leaders to step up, and protected my time.
- More Marigolds: As Jennifer Gonzalez writes for the Cult of Pedagogy, teachers should find their marigolds and avoid walnuts. While I think I work with some rockstar teachers, last year I worried that I was becoming a walnut, worn rough from years of thankless martyrdom. In an effort to move forward, I have worked to find the “fertilizer” that will help me grow anew as a marigold.
Epilogue: Martyr No More
This is easily one of the most personal posts I have ever written. I didn’t write this post to complain about my job. Instead, I wanted to share my struggles with other teachers. (You can find more ideas for school-life balance here.) Isolation is also a mark of the martyr, and I don’t want any of you to feel alone in this. Reach out. Let us know how we can help you put down your burdens.
* The articles that form a kind of constellation of inspiration for this post are varied. Some of them are older, and I have been mulling over them for a while. Each one is worth a read.
- “Workism Is Making Americans Miserable” by Derek Thomas for The Atlantic
- “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” by Anne Helen Peterson for BuzzfeedNews
- “You and the Puppet: Greg Ashman’s Mind Trick for Emotional Constancy” by Dave Stuart Jr.
Photo by Alex Braga on Unsplash
