Teacher Burn Out

February 4, 2022

Much has been made of the mass exodus of teachers from the profession over the past three years, but most especially this year.  There are literally schools having to close down because there aren't enough teachers to staff them.  Of course the pandemic and all its attendant stresses, anxieties, and health concerns have been a big contributor to the problem, but it occurs to me that there is another huge contributing factor that not too many people are talking about.  

One of the ways schools, including mine, adapted to online teaching during the height of the pandemic panic was to shorten the school day for students and offer essentially online office hours every day,.  Teachers were required to be online for an hour and a half or so, and students could use that time to process, do homework, or check in with a teacher if they needed additional guidance.  In addition to being available for students, teachers were able to use that additional time to plan, grade, collaborate, and prep for their classes.  Of course during the normal school year most of us secondary teachers have a planning period, but it is nowhere near enough time to adequately do all the things one needs to do in order to be an effective, creative, and responsive teacher at the highest level (especially if we are constantly asked to give up this planning period to cover classes for absent colleagues).  Elementary teachers don't even have a planning period scheduled into their day at all. This profession is predicated on the understanding that we MUST do work outside our teaching day in order to do the job well--a lot of it.  During our online pandemic response, when we actually built time in the schedule to do those things, and to give kids time to work and process within their school day, it was literally the first time in my 30 years as a teacher that I felt I could have a life outside of the school hours without constantly feeling guilty that I should be ALWAYS working.  My students felt like it was the first time they had ever really had time to give full attention to the study and learning of materials, rather than just speeding through deadlines.

When we think of teacher burnout, perhaps it is because that for a moment in time, when we reimagined school for a moment because we HAD to, there were some things we got right, and we were all able to catch our collective (academic) breath.  In our rush to go back to a sense of 'normalcy' for everyone, we forgot that we could instead move forward and incorporate some of the good we learned from our forced pause in traditional learning.  Instead we all just jumped back on the hamster wheel.  If we had never gotten off and stepped back to see that the hamster wheel is capable of slowing and changing pace, we might not be so overwhelmed racing to get back on it.  You don't realize what you don't know until you experience it.  And now that we have, we recognize that spinning our wheels faster because that's 'normal' isn't the best plan of action; it's just what we have always done in the past.  And man, some people just want to get off altogether now that we have seen another way to operate the ride that doesn't have us spinning out of control.