Posts Tagged → Teacher burnout

Balance Beams & Playing the Heavy

I had to give out so many referrals yesterday. About an order of magnitude above the usual number (which is nothing overboard — maybe a handful a week). It was exhausting and just … terrible. I’m not sure how else to describe it.

We recently learned that a significant portion of the students at my high school are “off track,” or missing the credits they need to graduate because they have failed or are currently failing classes, and admin freaked out about it. They sent out a slew of emails, held lots of meetings, and then sent out more emails about the meetings, which required further administrative communication (in the form of emails about emails about meetings). They didn’t say it directly, but the essential message to teachers was: We’re panicking; we need to do something.

There’s a perfectly rational explanation for this perceived dip in student performance — it’s the start of a quarter and grade books only have one or two grades in them. My classes have only had around 2 graded assignments after these first few weeks, so the students’ entire grade is currently based off of a very small sample. I mean, if a student missed one single assignment so far, they’d technically be failing.

It’s the equivalent of a baseball coach yelling at a batter after missing the first pitch of the year because his batting average was too low.

The grades will normalise after we get a better sample of students’ performance. In two weeks, I’d say, things will be closer to normal, with final quarter grades being the truly accurate measurement.

However, in the meantime, I’ve decided to try to help the problem anyway because, A) What if I’m wrong? Maybe there’s another reason why on-track data has slipped, and B) Why not try some new approaches? iI there’s a chance they help, why not give it a whirl?

I decided to focus on a group of students that are often overlooked and brushed to the side: The Barely-Theres. The ones who are at school, but only barely. Those students who do zero work, who contribute about as much as a cardboard cut-out.

In most classes at our school, there are at least one or two students who, for whatever reason, do absolutely nothing. They sit in the back of the class with their head down, don’t respond to questions, don’t turn in assignments, will ignore nearly every instruction, and are perfectly fine with failing the class. You can ask them, “Hey, is everything okay? I notice you’re not doing this assignment. Would you mind telling me why?” And they will just stare blankly at you and/or maybe shrug. Even hit them with an office referral and there will be no change. Email home? No response.

It’s heartbreaking. But in a class of 35 students I can’t spend 10 minutes trying to get little Tommy to read Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address when all he’s barely willing to sit up (and even that only sometimes).

This week I decided to spend a little more time with those students. After all, if I can get a few of them to up their performance just a little bit, they’ll be passing, right? It’s good for them, good for admin, good for the school.

Not so “yay” for me, though. It sucks to have to “play the heavy” all day long. I had so many hallway conversations (“I want you to finish this assignment. What can we do to make that happen?”), sent so many emails to admin (“Tommy didn’t come back from lunch–have you seen him?”), wrote so many referrals (“Tommy, after repeated warnings, decided to make a TikTok dance videos in the back of the classroom while he was supposed to be writing a rough draft.”)

I was never mean about it. Just adamant. You will get this work done. I’m sorry, but putting your head down for 90 minutes is not acceptable.

I got a lot of nasty looks, got cussed at, threatened with the ol’, “My mom will hear about this!” gambit. (Which is not at all as frightening as students think it is. Oh, sweetie, I would LOVE to have a chat with your parents. Let’s call them right now!)

On top of having to be confrontational the whole day, I lost instructional time because I had to spend all those extra minutes having hallway convos; doing everything just took a lot longer and I wasn’t able to spend as much time with students who needed more academic help.

By the end of the day I was wiped. Utterly exhausted, both physically and emotionally.

You’ve got to find a balance, but I’m still not sure where that balance is for me. I’m certainly not sure if I can keep this up.

My only wish to catch a fish so juicy sweeeet

Making lesson plans stresses me out. It always has and I see no reason to assume that it will stop — everyone says you need to spend 5 years at a teaching position before you’re “comfortable” there, so I figure I’ve got years of stress left. And, while I consider this kind of stress to be a “Good Stress” (a B.S. term for stress that produces better results from us working-class drones), I do think it is sometimes detrimental to my health.

It doesn’t help matters that I’m a perfectionist when it comes to planning. “Perfectionist” might not be the right word. I’m a planaheadionist. A person who believes that being well-prepared is one of the best things you can do to improve your classes.

In any classroom, there are a million things you can’t control. You can’t control whether or not Timothy is going to refuse to participate. You can’t control if or when Susan will throw a pencil at Timothy because he keeps whispering at her. You can’t control if you’ll get diarrhoea and you certainly can’t control whether or not 90% of your students haven’t ever heard of Mark Twain.

One of the only things you can control is how well you’ve planned that day’s lesson. Depending on all the other factors, your preparation can make or break the whole day. It’s not a silver bullet, but it is a bullet, and bullets are strong. Wait, what? (Maybe bullet metaphors might not be the best metaphors to fire off in this situation.)

Anywho. If I find myself ill-prepared, I get so anxious about it I’ll make myself physically sick. Not even joking — during my first 1-2 years of teaching at a public school, I’d call in for mental health reasons once or twice a semester. I used to feel guilty about it, but now I think fuck that. I’m going to take as many sick days as I see fit.

It does explain why I get so manic sometimes. I’ve known so many great teachers in my life that doing anything less than my best at this job makes feel like I’m letting everyone down.

That’s why you’ll find me so frequently on a school night mumbling over Amazon.com like some suburban Gollum whispering, “Why shouldn’t I have a PRINTER all my own. Yes, yes! A Brother printer for my desk and maybe one more for my classroom…!”

Not to make myself sound like God’s gift to anything. While I know that preparedness is a key to success, all that amounts to most days is I’m painfully aware of how ill-prepared I am.

And that stresses me right out.