Topics: Gratitude/ Grateful/ Thankfulness/Thankful
Thanks to all the supporters who walk me through the storm
Have all of you is the best blessing in my life
As the challenges come, I am never alone
Never thought about the durable relationships we have
Kind, caring, and helpful are the best descriptions of you in my zone
Full of gratitude presented with love
U are my unsung heroes deeply rooted in my bone
Let me express my deepest appreciation in brief
As I have two days off in a row, I am aware of Thanksgiving is coming. I am sitting down at a cafe and typing some thoughts. I need to do class prep and experiment with electric circuits. As I am teaching P1 math to little monsters, I also need to prepare for the math class. I am so lazy doing all these.
Well, Thanksgiving is a season to express gratitude and have a reunion. I miss Grace who never gives up on me, who understands the power of connection, and who insists that kids will become the best they can be. I love her! ❤️😍
Thanks to everyone who has helped me until now to get through the storm. Michale, Sally, Julia, Glen, Nina, Pat, all of you are my heroes. I am looking forward to my graduation in December and receiving my teaching license afterward.
Some of the downsides to accessibility through technology:
When our email, grade book, lesson plans and more are all accessible within seconds it’s easy to say, “I’ll just check this one thing…” and then fall into a rabbit hole that has us working for hours. It’s easy to say “leave work at work,” but that’s hard to do when so much of our work is accessible electronically and with us all the time.
When parents, administrators and even students can reach us 24/7 there’s no safe place to rest. Many teachers report complaints coming in from administrators late in the evening and irate calls from parents at all hours.
Sometimes it seems teachers are expected to be in competition for a cape with “Super Teacher” printed in glittery gold letters on the back. There’s constant pressure to answer every message immediately and to scour Pinterest for the perfect templates for all projects big and small.
This often causes a strain with romantic partners, friendships and family members. Our kids see us working from our phones instead of watching them at soccer practice. Our dates, friends, and family get frustrated when we take work calls during dinner. Being in constant teacher mode isn’t fair to us or the people who care about us.
Going in and out of work mode means you’re never really relaxing. There’s no chance to rest and recharge.
All of this means teachers become even more burned out. This isn’t good for anyone – the teachers, their families, administrators or students.
Teachers have the right to set boundaries about how and when they work outside of the school day. Here are some ways to do that:
Nothing with a student is so crucial that we need to handle it in our personal time. If there is an emergency with the student, they need medical or mental health professionals, not a teacher. Caring about our students shouldn’t take away from caring about ourselves and our own families.
The first step to achieving this is to not even have it installed on your phone. It can wait.
Anything else can wait until the school day. Setting boundaries with supervisors is terrifying for many people, but it gets easier with practice.
Parents and students shouldn’t be able to call or text our personal phones! That’s a violation of our personal space. Just say no to giving out that info.
Many teachers use a different name or email address to limit the chances they can even be found on social media.
Teachers have the right to set boundaries about how and when they work outside of the school day. Here are some ways to do that:
Nothing with a student is so crucial that we need to handle it in our personal time. If there is an emergency with the student, they need medical or mental health professionals, not a teacher. Caring about our students shouldn’t take away from caring about ourselves and our own families.
The first step to achieving this is to not even have it installed on your phone. It can wait.
Anything else can wait until the school day. Setting boundaries with supervisors is terrifying for many people, but it gets easier with practice.
Parents and students shouldn’t be able to call or text our personal phones! That’s a violation of our personal space. Just say no to giving out that info.
Many teachers use a different name or email address to limit the chances they can even be found on social media.
We don’t need parents, admins, colleagues, and students knowing the details of our weekend before we get to school Monday morning. Use the privacy settings to lock down social media accounts.
Ami, who provides occupational therapy in schools, frequently runs into teachers and parents who want to chat about student processes outside of school. Running into people who want to talk at restaurants, grocery stores, etc. is inevitable. It’s okay to say, “It was great to see you! I’ll be in touch during school hours.” and move on.
If you can afford it, use separate devices designated for work and personal use. Refrain from installing work-related apps and programs on your personal devices.
If separate devices isn’t an option, turn all work-related notifications off.
The best course of action is to simply commit to not working outside of school as often as possible. (And it’s usually possible way more often than we think.) Ron, a Florida teacher, says,
I refuse to work outside of contract hours. Grades and lesson plans can wait. I enjoy teaching, but it will not be my identity.”
Check out how this teacher mom decided to leave work at work and how it’s made her a better parent AND teacher.
It’s important to protect ourselves from burnout. The best way to do that is to be proactive in reducing our workloads and our accessibility after hours. Setting boundaries is hard but so important and beneficial to our quality of life. If we all take steps towards changing what is expected for teachers, we can slowly create a field that is healthier for all of us.
Reference: https://boredteachers.com/post/surprise-surprise-teachers-have-personal-lives-too-well-get-back-to-you-during-school-hours
I woke up tired and did NOT want to come to work for any reason. I just felt exhausted and really lacked the motivation to do anything. I just want to stay home doing nothing. I had the weekend doing what I wanted and enjoyed shopping at the markets, but I am LAZY at the moment. I am here at school, but I don’t wanna doing anything. My brain is rusty.
I love the fascinating kids who surround me. They’re so funny and so resilient. And they are without a doubt worth getting up before sunrise and putting in way too many hours a week. I mentor kids outside of school, and I’ve developed lasting relationships with kids I taught more than a decade ago.
At my school, we eat with students in the lunchroom. I’ve been with kids for four hours at that point and have four more to go. I’d just like to talk to an adult for fifteen minutes while I wolf down a salad. We spend 10–15 minutes lining kids up in the hallway at dismissal and waiting until the entire school is silent. Try having that as your last interaction with kids before the weekend. Worst of all is supervising lunch detentions. Eating while pacing around the room eyeballing kids and silently daring them to throw another pea across the classroom? Very relaxing and conducive to good digestion.
Teachers at my school design their own curriculum. It’s a massive time commitment and responsibility—and a huge privilege. I get to teach kids whatever books I think they’ll love. I spend tons of time every summer reading up on the research, and I seek out my own training opportunities. And I wouldn’t change a thing about that.
Sometimes that’s money. More often it’s time. I never have planning at the same time as the exceptional ed teachers, so any co-planning we do has to take place outside of school. Same with my grade level team; our planning is so often taken by conferences, there’s hardly ever time to explore cross-curricular connections that would really help our kids. And when we do have a teacher planning day, it’s invariably a “data dive,” where we talk about test scores all day and never address ways we can actually help the students.
A kid came up to me this year and said, “My sister said not to worry that I can’t read that well, because she says you taught her how to read.” And dude, I totally did. I get kids who come in reading at a second grade level and they make three or four years of progress in my class. I take kids who can’t write a sentence and teach them how to write coherent essays. And I’m nothing special; teachers all over the place are doing this for their students. It’s basically a superpower.
We give computer-based benchmarks three times a year, state tests every spring, and a variety of standardized measures of achievement in between. Every time, I’m expected to analyze each student’s performance and growth in stupefying detail and then differentiate activities based on Lexile level, language usage skills, vocabulary, and a plethora of other factors. Problem is, these assessments and the endless analysis that accompanies them don’t actually tell me anything new about my kids. I already know which kids are low readers. All this accomplishes is putting competent kids in groups that are too low for them because they had an off day during testing.
I draft former students as mentors. When I don’t have lunch duty, I spend it listening to a kid talk about Marvel movies or helping a cohort of others apply to a scholarship for summer leadership camp. I’m getting trained in restorative justice so I can apply it in my classroom and, hopefully, my school.
I can’t pretend that yelling at kids to tuck their shirts in or punishing them for wearing the wrong color belt is preparing them for their future jobs. Who would willingly stay in a job where people treated you like that? Aren’t we trying to give them options for the future, a chance at jobs where they’ll be treated like responsible people? Should I really get bent out of shape if they whisper in the hall or if the line they march in to the bathroom isn’t geometrically perfect? I’m supposed to spend half my day tending to minutiae of student behavior that has no impact on their well-being or learning.
I love my kids and their families, and even my administration most of the time. Differentiation and lesson planning are my jam. But the things I have to do that are completely unrelated to student learning and growth are killing me. The time I spend on “data dives,” monitored bathroom breaks, and benchmark testing has to come from somewhere, and the other stuff I’m doing is too important to give up.
It comes down to horrible choices: Do I stop helping students apply to private high schools, or do I miss my own son’s school party because applications are due on Thursday? Do I stop giving long writing assignments that I have to grade so I can do more data analysis, or do I grade those papers at night and basically never see my husband or read a book again? The emotional weight of teaching is very real indeed.
I shouldn’t have to make these choices, and neither should anyone else. And it’s easy to fix: Provide support for teachers and trust them to spend their time in ways that help kids, rather than assign busy work to make them prove they’re doing their job. We love teaching … we just don’t have time to actually do it.
Reference: https://www.weareteachers.com/teaching-extras/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR0jAJr-P45iAokT-HW_B3cOW3sBOXDRGAADBfvxKaIJEByUFHZ6DIOoWTg#Echobox=1668196792