Teaching Secrets: Managing October Exhaustion

Teachers tend to find October to be a tough time to keep up energy! Check out the excerpt below from Education Week (in the Teacher Magazine section). If you are interested in reading the full stories, click here.

Teaching Secrets: Managing October Exhaustion
By Elena Aguilar

The exhaustion that typically hits teachers in October assaulted me in mid-September this year. While I will share some strategies that I’ve developed to manage this annual sense of being overwhelmed, I want to preface them with this: The problem is not that teachers and administrators don’t have adequate coping skills to manage our work; the problem is that the demands on us are absurd.

“Fatigue makes cowards of us all,” said the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi. So how do we alleviate fatigue so we can resume the good fight. My advice is to establish a “Pause Period” of several weeks to rejuvenate, reflect, and reconnect. Here are some of the components:

• Refresh your surroundings: Find another day’s worth of time to clean and organize your classroom. Coordinating the logistics can be tricky. Some teachers can get into school on weekends, while others might need to seek out creative solutions to be alone in their room or stay late after school. But by mid-October, there are bound to be piles of paper, work for bulletin boards, and other cleaning tasks to do. The mess is demoralizing and draining. Think of how much time is spent looking for that one important paper that you need to turn in right away! I know this extra work seems contradictory, but a day spent doing these tasks and setting up organizing systems can save a lot of time in the long term and be very satisfying.

• Re-ground yourself in the “why”: “Why am I doing this?” is what blasts through my head when work has worn me down. The "Pause Period" is a reflective time to reconnect with what brought you into teaching. Think about it, talk about it, write about it. Don’t evaluate whether you are accomplishing what you’d set out to do—just reconnect with those positive feelings. (For stories and inspiration on this topic, see this blog post I wrote at Edutopia.)

• Celebrate the successes: Sometimes the exhaustion comes when all we can see is how far we are from fulfilling our goals. In October, the growth in our teaching practice or in our students’ learning can be obscure, but we need to train ourselves to find every indicator of progress and we need to celebrate these. Recall the moments so far this year when you’ve felt alive, engaged, and excited in your work. What have you most enjoyed? When did you notice joy in your classroom? Think about students with whom your relationship has deepened or improved. Focus on what feels good and on every little positive change.
We need to hone our skills in noticing and documenting every ounce of learning, at identifying every scrap of student work that shows a tiny bit of growth. With this “data” in hand, we can develop a counter-narrative to the one that relies only on standardized test data to evaluate our work. If your students have learned then you have learned. Don’t let the progress be subsumed under exhaustion. Celebrate.

• Optimize your time: The next step in the Pause Period is to critically examine how you spend time. I once had a principal who made me document my hours each week. I was overwhelmed and couldn’t imagine cutting out anything, but I discovered activities that weren’t worth their time and effort. I recognized a number of inefficient classroom routines such as checking homework or taking attendance. I consulted with experienced teachers, observed other systems, and revised my own so that my routines took a third of the time they once did.

• Get some helpers: I also found a number of tasks I could ask parents, older students, or office staff to do. I discovered that students were happy to stay late and clean, organize, or put up bulletin boards in exchange for pizza. I separated the activities that only I could do (calling parents, writing grades, etc.) and those that I could delegate. And then I asked for help and usually got it!

• Learn to say no: The biggest challenge was to say no to the endless requests for my time. I really struggled with this, but I also learned which activities were really worth it. We have to set limits on our work day and week. While I recognize that we’re asked to do too much, I have also seen many teachers take on work that they could say no to, myself included.