This post is an excerpt of Chapter 1 from Jess' book Planning to Stay: Burnout, Demoralization, Exploitation, and How to Reclaim Self-Care, Your Classroom, and Your Life... Anyway
Your Classroom Will Take Everything. If You Let It.
I know because I let it.
This is a book about how to stay in the classroom written by someone who left. Because of the culture of loyalty teaching demands, this fact may turn many educators away from these pages automatically. After all, what could I possibly know? I’m a quitter.
It’s true, I quit teaching. I didn’t, however, quit learning. After my decade in the classroom took my health, my partnership, and my happiness, I spent five years working with teachers who needed the kind of support I could have used. I went back to school and used my graduate studies in social work to understand what happened to me, and what is happening for so many teachers. This book summarizes many of the things I’ve learned about the key ideas and practices that have allowed educators to reclaim their classrooms and their lives from teacher burnout, demoralization, and exploitation.
It’s true, at one point, I did let my classroom take everything. I know what that feels like. I also know what it feels like to find balance, purpose, and joy in work—even during the school year. In my work supporting teachers, so many were able to find their way to balance,
reclamation, and joy that I felt compelled to offer you the same tools, the same vision, the same feeling. If you’re open to hearing from a quitter, that is…
Sadly, You’re Not Alone
Educators around the country have discovered the insatiability of the gig; if you allow it, your classroom will take every waking second.
Even if you’re not physically at school nor actively working, your constant preoccupation can claim every moment of your life. Your classroom can stand between you and the people in your life, and even between you and your life itself. The demand has the potential to be never-ending; you could constantly strive to perfect another lesson, and, once it’s been perfected, you could continuously better-customize it for this year’s students, this particular period’s students, students as distinct individuals. There will never be a time when zero students would benefit from another hour of one-on-one support, another call to a family member another reminder about the quiz Friday, and the free dental clinic appointment
sign-up Monday.
What’s great is that, if you’re like most teachers, you’ve never received specific, targeted instruction on how to design your approach to maximize your joy-rich efficacy while minimizing the tasks that steal your soul. Why is that great? It’s great because it means that you may think the long march to classroom soul-sacrifice is inevitable. Let’s correct that perception here and now: the long march to classroom soul-sacrifice is not inevitable. This
is great news because you’re about to learn how honoring yourself will support your commitment to being an excellent teacher—as a part of living an excellent life, which also happens to include teaching.
The tasks that devour teachers’ time are usually not
the tasks that make teaching meaningful.
Teachers can—and must—take control of their time in order to both live their values and value their lives. You can do this by owning your time. This book will guide you to build a comprehensive approach to planning which merges:
Your professional obligations
Targeted self-care for excellence and joy in classroom and life
Calendaring (a verb) to enact the life you wish to cultivate
By-the-minute lesson planning to ensure that the values that brought you to the profession are evident in your classroom interactions
By building and enacting these skills, you can protect:
Your peace and happiness
Your professional power
Your relationships (both in your personal life and with students)
Your going-to-die-one-day integrity
It will take some work. But that’s okay. We already know you’re pretty good at that. ;)
On Your Way Out Already?
If you are reading this as you actively consider leaving, please consider one possibility (via morbid metaphor) before you go; in emergency medicine, someone who appears to have perished due to hypothermia can’t be declared deceased until they are “warm and dead.” In hypothermia, the body’s processes slow down so much that people can appear dead, be closed in a body bag, and then sit upright hours later, bewildered and very much alive, because their core temperature was allowed to increase slowly and safely.
If you can bear it, consider resisting the urge to quit when you’re cold; don’t quit in the heart of your pain, frustration, sadness, exhaustion, and hopelessness.
If your health, family, and sanity can bear it, consider warming up first.
Explore the approaches and complete the exercises in this book, perhaps for as little as one more month of active teaching. I hope that having done so, you’ll be able to make the most empowered, information-rich decision possible, based on the realization that you may be able to not just tolerate, but become deeply fulfilled again by your practice.
From a calm, centered place, it may feel not only possible, but powerful and exciting to plan to stay.