Teacher Burnout vs. Demoralization vs. Exploitation

This post is a modified excerpt of Chapter 2 from Jess' book Planning to Stay: Burnout, Demoralization, Exploitation, and How to Reclaim Self-Care, Your Classroom, and Your Life... Anyway

“It’s not the load that breaks you down; it's the way you carry it." - Lena Horne

Burnout

Of the three causes of professional discontent (burnout, demoralization, and exploitation), burnout is the easiest to identify, the quickest to remedy, and the speediest to heal after behavior change.

Burnout is a simple equation; energy out > energy in. It occurs when the energy we have available for a given task or idea is less than the energy the task or idea requires. We’ll be grateful for burnout’s reference to flame as apneumonic device, as fuel is shorthand for stored energy.

Over short periods, we can usually recover from energy discrepancies. For example, we

may be exhausted after organizing community members as audience members for student presentations on a Friday, but if we can rest over the weekend and return enthusiastically, our overall energetic balance doesn’t tip towards burnout. If, however, tiny daily imbalances don’t have the chance to refresh over time, we’ll experience the numb exhaustion characteristic of burnout.

Although burnout’s causes are both individual and organizational, the blame is placed on individual teachers for allowing themselves to burn out. Burnout is real and can have real impacts on your practice, your relationships, and yourself. While our culture overly blames

the practitioner, especially when burnout is confused with demoralization and exploitation, there is some freedom in that single-person blaming: if individuals are the sources of their own burnout, so, too, can they be the sources of their own healing. To a point.

"Burnout" oversimplifies a complex range of symptoms and experiences with both environmental and biological causes. I am coming to understand both burnout and depression as diagnoses involving mental “metabolism;” in fact, the American Psychological Association has acknowledged burnout as a sort of work-induced depression. As someone who also manages actual clinical depression (thank you diet, daily exercise, talk therapy, and medication), I want to be very clear. While there are concrete, specific behaviors that improve prognoses of both burnout and depression, individuals can’t and shouldn’t be blamed if and when the actions they take to remedy these conditions are insufficient to rebuild their energetic reserves. It’s a nature vs. nurture question. Addressing burnout means addressing the energetic demands placed on a practitioner in context and examining practitioner behaviors and responses.

If a burned-out teacher has engaged all the self-care and mindfulness in the world and still wakes up with nightly panic attacks, I hope the whole world would support that teacher in choosing to leave teaching—and then immediately get to work building a system in which any teacher would want to stay.

Demoralization

“I want to become a teacher to force my students to

lose their love of learning as painfully as possible.”

– No Educator, Ever –

“Demoralization” was coined by Dr. Doris Santoro, who distinguished demoralization as a separate phenomenon from burnout. Dr. Santoro, a curious philosopher who cares about public education and educators, interviewed hundreds of teachers who left the profession to construct her understanding of demoralization. Her work opened my eyes.

When people asked me if I was burned out, I said "No, I'm heartbroken." I was not, on balance, burned out. I was demoralized.

We become demoralized when asked to act in service of values that conflict with the values that drew us to the profession.

Demoralization is an individual experience determined by an educator’s individual moral commitments. Demoralization occurs, however, under the umbrella of institutional oppression; the institution’s values are in conflict with each of our own. It’s in the institution’s best interest to maintain power, and if it does so by cruelly asking us to work in honor of values that aren’t our own, the institution is both behaving oppressively and isn’t terribly bothered.

Exploitation

Teachers, especially at the start of their career, are the most compassionate, moral folks I know (though we might be right up there with nurses, who engage in a similarly feminized profession). Bummer for us, the opposite of compassionate morality is psychopathy.

Psychopathy and compassionate morality go together like cake and ice cream—if we envision that the moral compassionate bakes, churns the ice cream, hand-decorates the cake with a celebratory message in a tidy script, then hands the plate over for the psychopathic system to devour. Messily. And without saying “thanks.”

Important to note here; psychopathic individuals can participate in caring professions. Because helping professions are places where psychopaths find access to piles of morally compassionate people, actual psychopaths find their way into schools more often than we’d like to admit. Please be careful, and trust your gut in any relationship that makes you feel bad while you’re earnestly trying your best.

Psychopathy is “a set of personality traits and behaviors frequently associated with lack of emotional sensitivity and empathy, impulsiveness, superficial charm, and an inability to learn from experience.”

For us moral compassionates, the mere existence of a person who is only looking out for

“number one” is nearly impossible for us to understand. If we think of this metaphor in terms of the 4 I’s of oppression, it’s a bit easier to think of the system as behaving like a psychopathic individual; the ideologies and institutions we serve are self-serving. Power’s guiding value is to maintain power. If those of us who are less concerned with power allow it, power for power’s sake becomes a guiding systemic ideology.

From an evolutionary perspective, psychopaths co-evolved with those of us who are compassionately moral in a perfect balance. To put it bluntly, there are givers and takers, and when we’re not paying attention, it can seem like we need each other.

The bottom line is this: school systems tend to be takers, and teachers tend to be givers. School systems lean towards the psychopathic, and teachers lean towards moral compassion. In a head-to-head competition between psychopaths and not psychopaths, psychopaths will always win.

Does this mean you have to stop teaching? No. You do not need to stop teaching. You need to stop pretending you’re teaching in what could or should be a supportive community, make a few changes, and keep right on teaching.

Unlike person-to-person relationships, you’re in a person-tosystem relationship with a psychopathic system. The clinical advice for dealing successfully with psychopaths is clear; don’t. Because we know the system is psychopathic and relationships with psychopaths aren’t survivable, you need to end your current relationship with the system.

This is very different than ending your relationship with your teaching practice.