Posts Tagged → Teacher burnout

Like a lighthouse keeper with a broken bulb sitting on the rocks and weeping at the tide

Yesterday was ACT day at my school district and it was just…depressing.

It had snowed the night before (in April?!) and there was talk of a snow day, but we really only had about an inch, it wasn’t super icy, and all of it melted by early afternoon. Still, it was chilly and there was a bit of traffic. As we left the house, I felt bad for students who had to wait for a bus to come pick them up, which is (unfortunately) a lot of my students.

I was a proctor in the “Late Start” room, which meant I would be monitoring everybody who didn’t get to school by test time. My room would wait 2 hours and start normally so all the students who weren’t here on time would have a place to get their ACTs done. I was worried there’d be a bunch of late arrivals (more than last year) because of the weather, but there were only a handful.

On ACT day, only juniors come to school (because it somehow makes sense to give people an important test when they’re not yet finished learning English, Math, or Science). The juniors who were late that day weren’t just students whose cars wouldn’t start — they were the chronic absentees, students who are almost never on time. There are a lot of kids with this issue; Absenteeism is a big problem in American education.

It’s such a problem that I feel bad about speaking ill of these students. I know some of them and know that they don’t have easy lives, so disparaging them doesn’t feel all that cool.

Still. They are simply and frankly so dim-witted that I cannot fathom it. Literally. I cannot wrap my head around their lack of common sense or the complete absence of basic academic skills. I try to find reasons; I try to understand, to make sense of it. But, ultimately, I have no idea how or why they came to be this way. It has to be something systemic. A fundamental and (series of) major malfunction(s) in the way these children are raised and educated. Not just parents, not just teachers, not just friends — some combination of everything that can possibly go wrong going wrong.

I’ll just tell you about one student’s actions on ACT day so as not to over-pick all this low-hanging fruit.

One student, call him “Steve,” was having some trouble with the non-cognitive portion of the test. (That’s basically the part at the start of the test where you write down your name, address, and email. It’s not even really “part of the test.”) At the top of his question booklet, there was a spot for his “Name” and “Signature.”

As we read instructions, we made it explicitly clear that everyone had to write their name and add their signature. We announced it. We went around to tell everyone one-to-one that they needed to both write and sign their name.

“Steve” left this part of his question booklet blank.

As I was making my rounds, going desk to desk and helping each student in turn, I stopped by his desk and gently reminded him, “You write your name right here and then, right here, under that, add your signature.” Then I continued making my rounds to help the others. (“Steve” was, unfortunately, not alone in struggling to add his name and signature to a piece of paper.)

When I returned to “Steve”s desk, I was pleased to see that he’d written something.

Only…it wasn’t quite right.

The “Name” section he’d decided to keep blank. Where it said “Signature,” he’d written “STEVE” in big, elementary school block block lettering. That’s right–just his first name. He saw “Name” and “Signature” and thought to himself, “I can just write ‘Steve.’ Those ACT people will be able to sort it out.”

“Almost,” I said to him. “See here? You need to sign this. Do you have a signature?”

“Steve” didn’t respond.

“Just…uh, write your first name and last name here. And then, uh, write your name in cursive here.”

“Steve” didn’t respond. He almost never does. In my Creative Writing class, he’s one of the students who puts his head down and will not participate at all. I’ve tried to reach out to guardians, I’ve got admin involved, I’ve spoken to counselors. He doesn’t work, doesn’t respond, doesn’t seem to talk to anybody. I try to approach him with grace because…well, shit, what else is there?

At this point in our ACT journey, I figured it was a typical “lead a horse to water” scenario. If this kid doesn’t know what a signature is, then he’s got bigger problems than his ACT composite score. Besides, there was no time to teach him how to sign his name on test day. There were other students waiting, and the ACTs are very rigid on protocol — we have to start and stop at certain times, so we had to keep going.

“Just write your name twice,” I said.

“Steve” looked at his paper. Then he put his head down.

After that, I had to look up “Steve”s address because he didn’t know it. Same with his school email. While explaining that to him (“No, you need the ‘at’ symbol. It’s right there. No, there. This one.”), I had to explain how bubble tests work, because he’d apparently forgotten the PreACTs (and all the other Scantron tests he’s had to take over the years). Then I had to show him how to turn his answer booklet to page 3, which was beyond him. (“The pages are numbered — just like a book!”) In a lot of ways, it was like trying to get a cat to take a test.

The only difference was that cats don’t ask questions. Throughout the whole day, “Steve” had two things he wanted to ask about.

First (and this was before the test started) was, “When is lunch?”

The other question (that he asked 6 times over the course of 4 hours) was, “Can I go to the bathroom?”

As I write this, I feel like I’m not accurately showing you what the whole thing was like. It is so depressing that “blogging it up” with any sort of humor feels like I’m not treating it as seriously as I should.

It was like watching a car wreck.

No.

It was like sitting on the shore of a rocky beach somewhere, watching people struggle for breath beneath the crashing of tremendous waves, hearing their shouts, seeing their arms flail out beyond the breakers. I try to throw flotation devices their way, but they don’t know what a flotation device is, so they slap it away. The cry and wail and holler toward the shore, “Are we going to get some kind of snack at least? It seems unfair that we can’t eat!”

“Of course you can have a snack!” I shout back at them, “but could you focus on not drowning for a bit!?”

I’m met with a chorus of barely-audible gurgles that rise above the sound of the surf and all seem to moan, “I need to go to the bathroom!”

(Yes, I know the kid who went to the bathroom 6 times was probably vaping in there. But guess what? I am not the goddamned bathroom police. I refuse to be. Short of following him in there and standing right outside his stall, there’s not much I can do to curb that kind of shitty behavior. Plus, you never know. Maybe he had the rumble tums and legitimately needed to poo.)

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.