Is Teaching Sustainable For Your Lifestyle?

I have been a teacher for two years, and I have been ferociously fighting the urge to take school work home. For some odd reason, while still being a teacher, I found it extremely weird to bring work home.

 

You see, I love freedom. I love that at home I can indulge in doing the things that are not related to my job. I have recently understood the importance of doing nothing while giving yourself time to relax, process ideas, be in the moment for you, your family. And that was quite a shift from the mentality I had two years ago.

 

Although I rarely took school work home, my mind was often in the mode of reliving the things that had happened during the week, and that was entirely emotionally and physically draining. But the changes were coming, and just a miracle was needed to snap me out of the spell of living through the work week again and again. That miracle happened on an ordinary Saturday.

 

I was sitting my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter Milania. She was trying to play with me and was probably getting more and more frustrated at me being silent, reacting with nods and staring into nowhere with glassy eyes. I snapped out when my daughter was holding my face in her chubby soft hands, looking at me and repeating, “Hey mommy! You no look  at me!!!”

 

That was the day that made me realize that doing or thinking about work at home is an evil, green, energy-sucking vampire I could not tolerate anymore, and I started making changes. The changes were slow, painful, but by all means worth my blood and tears that I put into it.

 

I know some teachers don’t care if they take work home. They might be into creating at home, which gives them joy. Or maybe, they have a small side hustle of selling their creations on TpT. Having said that, I also know many teachers and former teachers, now bloggers, who gave it all to being a teacher and having long evenings in classrooms to get things done, and who quit and never regret having done that.

 

I believe there is one big reason for people quitting teaching after five or ten or even twenty years of teaching, and this reason is SUSTAINABILITY. There comes the point of time when a new teacher or a teacher with a few years of experience has to decide based on the changes in their priorities or family circumstances whether teaching is still a sustainable activity. And by being sustainable I mean the following: can you handle being effective, organized, and able to produce, modify and differentiate content five days a week in addition to managing all the paperwork and testing that the profession requires?

 

My honest and humble answer is NO. I can’t do it.

 

Trying to balance school work and personal life is almost not possible for me. I will have to either forget about my interests, rely on a tablet to educate and entertain my daughter, or I will have to do the minimum I can sustain in a school environment so that major tasks are done, and I don’t feel emotionally and physically drained. If you are a teacher, you know that doing “minimum” in school is not possible. Teaching and preparation for teaching as well as handling the processes in your work are never-ending tasks that can accumulate with the speed of light even if you take one day off. There is so much we, teachers, are expected to do and perform at a certain level that somehow cheating the system into doing the minimum, focusing on a few important tasks only and reaching sustainability is a direct ticket to failure. Teaching cannot function on the “minimum,” and if things are done just to sustain ourselves being in the system, we, teachers,  feel like we failed our students.

 

The realization of your capability or incapability to sustain yourself in teaching can bare wonderful fruits for your personal awakening. Well, now that I know there is no way for me personally to sustain teaching as a career; otherwise, it will rob me of my time with my family and my identity outside of teaching, I feel much happier. It’s almost like giving up lying to yourself, facing the reality and pondering the questions: so what’s now?

 

This week I came home about 5:40 after a regular staff meeting on Monday. I drive an hour home, and that Monday was that rainy cold November Monday that can kill any enthusiasm. I came home anxious, feeling bloated, with a coffee taste in my mouth, sticky and smelly after a day of teaching. My mind unconsciously floated to the crowd of teachers leaving the auditorium after the meeting. Many teachers talked about school stuff, many teachers just silent, leaving the building, rushing to drive home. I saw lunch bags, totes, bags, backpacks. Almost every teacher carried something on their shoulders, a fat bag or a new responsibility thrown at them after the meeting. I was wondering what teachers were thinking, how they were planning to spend their evenings, how they planned to recuperate and be back tomorrow in the classes ready to face 100 -140 students.

 

That picture stayed in my mind for some time, and I almost had a crazy idea to walk from classroom to classroom and ask every teacher if they think they are happy. And if not, I would recommend them resources, books, podcasts that could put things in perspective for them and made them a little happier. But then I thought again, like I do most of the time, that the idea won’t work, it will be temporary, everyone will think I am delusional. In the end, I can not make any person happy unless they make it their own path. Happiness is not something you can suggest anyway, it’s something to be found.

 

I struggle to understand why one can find so many blogs and personal profile descriptions of people who left Corporate America and became entrepreneurs, making a million or more a year. And yet, everyone seems to think that when teachers quit or leave their profession, they disappear into the oblivion. That’s actually funny, isn’t.  I did find a number of blog posts written by teachers who left education to pursue something else, but for some reason, I couldn’t track, or there was no further information about how those teachers who left education defined their success later on. While I find nothing wrong with teachers who leave education and share it on social media, I find it a bit disillusioning to have nothing about their further actions, projects, wins, transformation.

 

So what if you answer no to the question “Is teaching sustainable for you?” It means your purpose now is to find the place in education where sustainability problem can be solved. Remember, everything is subjective in your experience. Your experience will heavily depend on the district you work in, the population of students and resources you work with, colleagues, support, professional development, the spirit of the educational institution you work for. So finding the place that would not require you to sacrifice anything in your life would be the right for you and for your future development as a teacher. Maybe you will find your place moving to a different school district or a different grade level, or even getting certification in a different but close area that you teach now. Besides, teaching by no means is limited to the public school system. Teaching exists at community colleges, university, vocational schools, adult education evening school, online. The goal is to find your place.

 

The takeaway is the following: you absolutely need to face reality and be honest with yourself about the feeling you have for your job. If something feels wrong, ask yourself if working in the current position and circumstances is sustainable. If the answer is no, start looking for the place that would work best for you. Give yourself permission to change your life by leaving places you aren’t happy with and find the place where your passion for teaching can return.