April

[MUSIC] If you're enjoying those who can't teach anymore, you should also check out teaching through emotions. It's a woman who podcasts award winning show that provides a rare form of relief for educators. Rare because it looks at bad feelings and bad behavior is meaningful and useful. Betsy Burris, teacher, educator, and psychotherapist, and Joe Johnson, longtime Spanish teacher, share stories of real life terrible teaching moments sprinkled with commentary and a ton of empathy. Then they show you how to transform those moments into happy endings. You also get to hear interviews with remarkable people about their unique takes on education. Episodes come out every two weeks. Listen to build up your psychodynamic muscles by hearing about other brave teachers' wins when they thought nothing would change. You can find teaching through emotions wherever you get your podcasts. Pam, are you here to game with me? In a minute, Ryan, but first it's time to share what's happening on the 10 News Podcast. The 10 News is a kids news podcast for curious eight to 12-year-olds that even grown-ups can learn from. What else is there to say? That we cover everything from the Supreme Court in the warn Ukraine to Pokemon and Minecraft and will always tell you 10 things you need to know. And we're available wherever you get your podcasts. Is it game time now, Pam? It's game time, Ryan. Let's go! As a high school wrestler, I would come home sometimes at one in the morning on a Saturday night. After a long bus ride from a wrestling tournament. I was usually still too wound up to go right to bed, so I would sit in the basement with a square cake, tub-ware, full of my mom's homemade cookies, and a bottle of tonic water. I like the tonic water because it would cut my cotton off. I'd eat the cookies, drink tonic, and watch that 70-show reruns until I was ready to fall asleep. Then on Sunday, I would eat everything. Wings, spaghetti, more cookies, and then I'd show up to practice on Monday between 10 and 15 pounds over, which meant I would have to cut weight through the week. This is not a healthy way for a wrestler to manage their weight from tournament to tournament. In college, I started to figure it out, and I did a better job of paying attention to what I ate. Not binging on the weekends and low-end behold, I felt better. I was able to maintain my energy and I didn't feel terrible. The idea of maintenance, be it physical or mental, is going to be important for thinking about how we can keep teachers in education. Teachers are often so busy during the school year that they end up only trying to build up their mental and physical health on the weekends or on breaks. The hope then is that their mental and physical health will be enough to last them until the next break. This is not sustainable. Welcome to those who can't teach anymore. A series that explores why teachers are leaving education, and what can be done to stop the excess. This season, we're getting a look at the year-and-life of teachers from across the country through their personal audio journals. Today, we hear about what it takes to make teaching sustainable. This is season 2, a different kind of the same thing, episode 9, April. Trying to keep my life balanced, but that's almost impossible. This is Amanda Smith, our calculus teacher from California, who tried to leave teaching last year, but was lured into teaching one more semester. Her biggest struggle this year has been having a healthy work-life balance. These students just, they're all operating at such a high level, which is a blessing and a curse. It's a different type of exhausting. It's a mental exhaustion. I love it in the moment, but it's just like my body can't take it. It's like my brain and my heart want one thing, and my body is just like screaming no. This is too much, and that breaks my heart. Amanda has 40 plus high-teaming students in each of her classes, and they need a lot. At the end of the day, I get home, I pull in my garage, and as soon as I turn the car off, I just sit there and put my head in my hands. I don't have a particularly long walk into my house. I have an attached garage and a one-story house, and I'm the first person to get home, so I'm walking into a house, and I have the place to myself for a few hours to relax before my husband gets home, you know, and no kids or anything like that to worry about. But even then, just sometimes I get home, and the idea of even just walking in the door is too daunting. A factor leading to teachers leaving the classroom is the exhaustion. Self-care has been a buzzword used by administration and keynote speakers to try to combat teachers leaving the classroom. But part of having self-care is having the energy to do things that fill your cup. For Amanda, she feels too tired to do much of anything when she gets home after a day of teaching and commuting. She has even been struggling keeping audio journals. It's difficult to record during the day because the walls are very thin in my classroom, and a teacher adjacent to me plays very loud music quite often to the point where I sometimes find myself sitting at my desk on my prep period, wearing noise, canceling headphones so that I can focus. The time in my day that I sort through everything that happened is when I'm in the car, and I can't easily or safely record while I'm commuting, and then by the time I get home, I'm just a lump. [Music] At the start of this project, I knew that folks would misrecording some of their audio journals. And I think the gaps in journaling speaks volumes about what it means to be a teacher, and the triaging of excess tasks that might need to happen to help teachers make it through the school year. When I met with each teacher that volunteered individually at the start of this project, I told them that I would love if they could record at least once a week. That was the goal, but I also told them that I expected them to miss weeks. And when that happened, I wanted them to not worry about it and to just move on. So, Amanda is articulating something that I think is very important. When we talk about self-preservation in education, it's worth acknowledging that not reflecting about education has been a way for some people to continue teaching. A through line that I've noticed during this project is that several of the teachers that love teaching skipped several weeks or months of recording. Elementary teachers Darcy Ostromiller of Wyoming, and Taylor Barrett Navito, both told me that they avoided recording anything negative in their audio journals. They both had some long gaps between journals, but they are also two teachers that were adamant about returning to the classroom in the future. But I want to point out that not journaling about negative parts of their year is not the same as putting their heads in the sand about problems in education. "I am currently heading home from sand. I stay capital and gotta long drive." A big reason I asked Darcy to participate in this season is because not only is she one of the most passionate and positive teachers I know, she's also highly involved in advocating for education. Darcy is a part of a group called Level Up, which is made up of people who have gotten teacher of the year and other teaching awards. "Today was not what they made to talk to the senators and the House representatives and the superintendent of public instruction to make our voices heard." This journal entry is from February, but I held on to it for this episode specifically. Part of what Darcy does to stay positive in education is actively participating in trying to make changes in education that will help teachers. "Right now, the combination of the climate has parents, for some reason, very suspicious of teachers. And that is a huge shift from 2020 where we were plus five as heroes and we were just doing our job. And today we are just doing the very best for our kids again, but there is this ease of distrust and I'm not quite sure where it came from." So even if part of Darcy's self-care is not talking about education, that doesn't mean she doesn't care about issues in education. Like everything else, how people find balance is unique to them. For other teachers on this project, not recording entries was less out of a desire to avoid dwelling on negative things in their day to day. and more because they were just busy. The level of Charles is Michael Redman. Updating him, I'm sorry, I didn't have been burning in my files every week. Michael is one of those teachers that got so busy he stopped recording for a while. To refresh your memory, Michael teaches a rapahoe and he's married to Ava who is our STEM teacher. There is a gap in Michael's journals from the fall to the spring because he was coaching. But now, Michael's back for an update. And the reason he's getting back to his recording is partially because of a nudge from Ava, but mainly because he has a break from coaching. The basketball seasons over, I think we won one game and lost 12 or 13 games. But we were in the wrong division, so we were in 2A. So next year we're going to go to 1A. Early on this year, Michael mentioned that he was going to coach one sport, but that job led to several other coaching jobs. He didn't stop coaching almost the entire school year. He just kept getting asked to coach the next season and the next season. The snowballing of coaching jobs is pretty common, especially if you're good with kids. Folks kept asking Michael to fill in vacant positions. But Michael doesn't mind. Being a coach means that he connects with students and environments outside of the classroom. And I get it. It's fun to see students thrive in things other than academics. One of my girls made it to be all-state, which was awesome. I'm glad she got picked to be one of the very few native people that get chosen and recognized. So I'm pretty proud of that. When thinking about what makes teaching sustainable, there are a lot of teachers that lean into the extracurriculars, coaching especially. It's one of those things that I've seen few people but also drain people. For people like Michael, coaching is an act of self-care. For people like me, I loved coaching. But I also knew that coaching on top of teaching drained me to a point that made me a bit worthless for my own friends and family, which I couldn't sustain. I want to highlight these differences because teachers aren't a monolith. Michael and several of the guys I coached with thrive on coaching. Michael in April is already thinking forward to next year and returning as a teacher and a coach. I signed my letter in intent to get for a rehire. So hopefully I'll get rehired again. And things seem to be doing pretty good. But coaching and other extracurriculars that are time-intensive like FFA or speech and debate have been hard on teacher families and teacher well-being. One of the last seasons that I coached high school girl soccer I had a long talk with a head coach on a way back from a tournament. Coaching, warming, high school sports means that three hour bus rides are normal. One hour is short and eight hours is not unheard of. So we had a lot of time to talk. I've known this particular coach my whole life. I wrestled with a son and he was one of my wrestling coaches as I was coming up. I asked him about his longevity of coaching and what he had experienced. He was frank about the challenges. Coaching had put strains on his marriage. He talked about missing out on parts of his own kids' childhoods. He said that now that he was a granddad, he wasn't going to miss out on anything. And when I told him later that year that I wasn't going to continue coaching soccer, citing that conversation, he understood. So often, schools push teachers to be involved in as much as the school is possible. To the point that teachers who only teach are seen as not invested in the school community. [Music] Velma Rose, the teacher who we know from speaking up at school boards and who just found a new job outside of the classroom, recorded a journal talking about how getting over-invested, impacted how she even applied for new jobs. I know way back when I was first becoming a teacher and we were coached on how to handle an interview and you essentially oversell yourself as being able to do anything. Like, you need me to coach a sport. I'm their sponsor club. I'm in it. You want me to teach something I might not be qualified to teach. Perfect. Sign me up. And we go into interviews as teachers, sort of with the expectation of like, be ready to fall on the sword to get this job. But as Velma has been working on becoming a counselor, she has been exposed to a culture that pushes back on the idea that teachers should sign up for everything. I go into this meeting, sort of approaching it, like I need to sell myself to these people who are taking me on as an intern and giving up their time. And so I really was overselling myself as like, "Yep, I'm interested. I can work any hours. I can come in. When you need me, I can weekends, evenings, you need to stay late, anything." And at one point, one of the clinicians in the room kind of stopped me and was like, "So what do you do for self-care?" The idea of self-care isn't new to education. But teacher self-care isn't necessarily thriving. Just look at the flood of teachers leaving the profession and the feelings of being overworked. And this may be in part tied to how schools have approached the topic of self-care. I remember going to a staff meeting where I had to stay late after my contract hours. During the one sliver of time, I can go outside and play with my dog and sit in this meeting where we fill out worksheets on self-care and had to write out essentially like, "What kind of rewards are we going to give ourselves for working hard?" And one of the options I just remember was like, option one was pack some chocolate with you at lunch or take a bubble bath after work. Like I'm all for those forms of self-care. In a way, it's like trapping in that cycle of if self-care is just rewards and it's just chocolate and bubble baths and things after you've worked really hard. Then of course, you're still kind of staying in that cycle of, "I need to work hard," but then after the fact, I deserve a little treat. Velma breaks down self-care into two categories, proactive or reactive. In education, a lot of the time self-care takes the form of a reward system that is reactive and hard to maintain. In her counseling training, Velma is thinking more about proactive self-care. I actually was able to really unlearn some of the things I've been taught about self-care through being an educator and that self-care is actually more of like a self-management system. It's more of a proactive thing that you should be doing all of that. You should be scheduling time to do something you enjoy every day. Whether that's a hobby or like I mentioned before, going outside with my dogs is like a daily requirement, making sure you have time built into your day to eat lunch. No matter what, always have a lunch scheduled. Part of proactive self-care also includes not waiting until breaks to take care of yourself. When teachers point to burnout as a reason for why they are looking to leave the profession, a common retort is to point out all of the time that teachers have off, which is true, but Velma points to the irony of having that time off. When that break comes, for me, there's sort of like this mix of relief and happiness, and then I've also gone straight into like a weird slump where I'm like, what do I do when I wake up in the morning? Do I deserve all this time off? I'm guilty. I'm not enjoying it. I am really anxious because I'm used to having every second of my days structured and always having an audience. And so I have noticed in my own life that sometimes breaks can come with mixed feelings. Teacher breaks are charged with expectations to do all of the things that teachers don't have time to do while they're teaching, including self-care. But for Velma, all of these expectations can be overwhelming. I also know that I put off all of my maintenance in life. Home maintenance, fixing things around the house, catching up on time with my wife, or just doing things that need to get done. I save all of that for when I have time off. And putting that kind of pressure on myself is almost as ridiculous as when we tell kids, like, you can't do a whole semesters of work in two weeks. But then as an adult, I expect myself to do half years worth of self-care and life maintenance in two weeks. And so I get into a slump because I start getting into this mental game of like, oh my gosh, if I don't paint, finish painting my bathroom, I won't get to that until summer. [music] So rather than wait until the breaks to do things that will help Velma maintain her well-being, she thinks about the kinds of things that she can be doing all year. Velma has gotten to the point that she thinks of the school year like a race. Here's a journal from April. I view the school year as kind of like running a mile on the track. A mile is typically like four laps. And first and second quarter is kind of like laps one and two. You're just sort of getting in your position. You're getting settled in. Quarter three is like the third lab where things start to turn a little scrappy and get into a dogfight and then fourth quarter is kind of just that sprint to the finish. It's like we all just got to make it to the end. I love the running analogy. I was also excited when Ashley Clark also made a running analogy. Ashley taught in Maine and left in the middle of the 2022-2023 school year in part because she was diagnosed with Bell's paulsy. As she looks back at her time as a teacher, her running analogy helped her think about how teaching was becoming unsustainable for her. When I was teaching, it was as if I was constantly checking the clock to know if I was going to make it. Whatever I'm running a 5k, 10k, half marathon, whatever. I generally am looking at my watch and kind of changing the mileage and telling myself, "Okay, you're halfway there." And you really kind of get to give yourself some pet talks along the way. And of course, my pace is going to change along the way. When I first start out, I really try to not let myself go too fast and really force myself to slow down. But then at the end, I'm just making my legs move because they don't want to. And it's fine to think back at the school year and how from the get go, I felt like I was in race mode. I was first trying to find your pace, find your footing, get to know your class, get to know the routine that year, the students, but to kind of get settled into those routines, it's like you find your cadence, you find your rhythm. And then from there, it was just clock in the miles. Like the first mile was maybe Halloween, second mile, parentage conferences, third mile, Thanksgiving, fourth mile, Christmas, fifth mile, end of the semester, and so on and so forth. So it just kept going. So now that I look at it, teaching was like running half marathon or a marathon. It was just you were constantly plugging away until there was nothing left at the end. And I can see that now and see where that was not sustainable. What I have found interesting about Ashley and Becca Swain, who is the other teacher that recorded journals for her first year out of the classroom, is that their ideas of self-care and what doing well looks like are different from many of the teachers that participated in this project. Many of Ashley's journal entries were reflective and compared how she is feeling in her new job working for a company using GIS to how she was feeling as a teacher, like when her dog died. I called my boss crying and said, hey, this is what happened. And she immediately said, get off the phone, go do whatever you need to, but don't come back or when she's happy. I feel like every day, I'm gonna get whacked on the head and shut back in the classroom. Or when she even gets to eat. As a teacher, I often would eat once a day. I would just push myself so hard and take care of everybody else all day that I wouldn't eat. I don't eat until I got home at night, any real substantial meal. So I felt like I was always like, finished and struggling with my energy level. I used to hate eating in front of students when I knew that they might not be getting more than one meal a day. So it's nice to be able to feed myself and not feel guilty about it. Or when she gets to run. I ran in my first half marathon and a lot of that time I was thinking about how grateful I am that I have the freedom to do this now. There's no way, inhale, I would have been able to spend a weekend like I did and completely enjoy myself like I thoroughly did if I had still been teaching. By April, Ashley has been out of education and working with her new company for about a year. This year has been the first time in her life that Ashley has had extra time on her hands. This is the first time in her life that she hasn't had to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. So her ability to take care of herself and feel happy and fulfilled consistently has been a result of having the time and the resources to do so. Time and resources that she didn't have while teaching. I have not gone to the gym since I was in college because that was last time I had access to a gym for free. So she's taking care of her physical well-being. But she is also noticing how much easier it is to take care of her mental well-being. I feel very grateful this year to have maintained my physical health, I guess, but my mental health through the winter. And Ashley recognizes that much of what is making her life easier is the fact that she's making more money without having to work extra jobs like she did when she was teaching. So it's just, it's incredible how much money, unfortunately, can impact my mental health and how much I really wish that I could help students and be a great teacher and also be able to take care of me. I really wish that and I wish that for other teachers. Becca Swain noticed similar things in her ability to take care of herself. Becca is a former elementary teacher in Oregon who is now working in the theater. Like Ashley, Becca has noticed that she isn't getting the Sunday scary anymore and that because she isn't exhausted at the end of the school day, she isn't living for the weekends. I'm also noticing that I'm more willing to do things on weeknights with friends when we get asked to make plans. Normally it was very much like no, no, no, I only do things on the weekends and I felt like my Saturdays and Sundays as a teacher got filled up really quickly because that was the only time I was willing to make plans. Now we're making plans during the week because I'm not exhausted after my workday. And this is something her friends are noticing. They'll text me during the week and we'll make plans and they're like, "Whoa, we love this new Becca energy and it's true and I didn't realize it would be something that my friends would notice. It wasn't even something on my radar that I thought would be a, I guess you could say, perk to having left a job that took everything I had." And Becca pointed out that part of her well-being is tied to maintaining her friendships all year, especially through the long winter months. I enjoy being available and feeling like my friendships are alive during the year. I kind of felt like my friendships went on a back burner during the school year and I was like, "I'll see you in the summer." And that's actually helpful to getting me through the winter, getting my wife and I through the winter with these, you know, dark nights with the sun setting so early. When we have plans it's just making us feel a little more alive and a little less like cabin fever and that's a huge perk. And I want to point out that both Becca and Ashley have talked about how much easier it has been to keep up on self-care even without summer break, winter break, Thanksgiving break, and spring break. The misconception that teaching is an easy job because of all the breaks is not helping keep teachers in the profession. It does more to make teachers feel like there's something inherently wrong with them that they have these breaks but aren't able to keep up on the mental and physical health. For some of the teachers that left the profession it might be to answer this question, is my environment part of why I can't maintain my well-being or am I incapable of maintaining my well-being no matter what? For Becca and Ashley when their environment's shifted, so did their well-being. The question then becomes, what can be done in the classroom setting that would allow for well-being to be maintained? Is it taking time off? Sophie Velasquez, our music teacher from Texas who has been interviewing for jobs outside of education, took time off to get married. She didn't wait until a break to live her life. We were able to camp and hike and really see some beautiful sights that we've never seen before. At night there were bright bright stars, the Milky Way was very visible at 9 p.m. which was amazing. Maintaining self-care can also be helped through having the chance to authentically bond and interact with other teachers. Wyoming Boost Teacher Megan Obergas knows all about bonding with her colleagues. I have two partner teachers and we all have things that we love. Like my classroom is fully decked out in sharks. I've got sharks coming out my ears. My one partner teacher across the hall for me loves moose. She has all the moose things. Earlier this season, Megan said that without her partner teachers, she'd go back to teaching in prison. For several journals, Megan tracked what I labeled in my notes, "Moose Misschiff." We have a teacher store, quote unquote, "where you get these little notes of encouragement from other staff members and then you can turn the notes in in certain increments to purchase things for yourself." So last year, they bought a shark warme and I'm like, "oh, this is for me. You bought it for me. This is going to be amazing." And I went to go buy the shark and the shark was gone. And I was like, "Huh? Who? Who would buy the shark? I am the only person in the school who likes sharks. Someone, someone bought the shark to be me, right? And it was gone. Absolutely gone." So I asked everybody, I was like, "Hey, do you know about the shark? Who bought it? Why would someone buy the shark?" I was just, it's just like a five-year-old. It turns out that her partner teacher bought the shark, so when a moose became available, Megan jumped to get it. So today, I contacted the person in charge of the case and I texted her and I said, "Hey, I need your help. I need to create a little mischief." And she replies back, she said, "What an wearer." And I thought that's the answer I wanted. Megan bought the moose and made one in posters for the moose. I had our title one special sneak one into the case and then I posted one in the staff lounge. I posted one above the laminator. I've no one in the staff bathroom like oh my god but now this is the hard part. I have to just sit and wait for my partner teacher to see them. Once her partner teacher saw the poster, Megan then made a ransom poster with pictures of the most posed in different locations around town. But my coworker figured out that it was me and so then the battle ensued. As I was posting his ransom pictures she started stealing sharks out of my classroom. First it was a mama shark that's simple that's little. Then it was a cat wearing a shark costume that she took and then it was my shark slippers. So I was like oh it is on. It is on. So the next day I took her most home max well in this and I put him in a tiny little white six to nine month baby shirt with sharks all over it and Max while the most got a little tattoo on his rear and his tattoo said I heart OG because I was gonna win this battle. OG stands for Megan's last name Obergos. That was like my final. If I give her back the moves so I get on my sharks back she has her moves but he has a tattoo on his butt that's the I heart OG so I will forever win the battle. When everything is said and done both Megan and her partner teacher end up with their respective moves and sharks and for Megan this is the kind of thing that keeps her going. It was the most fun we've ever had and it really had to do nothing about teaching students. It was just having that connection with my teammates. We got our kids involved. It was just fun and sometimes we're so focused on the academic part of school that we forget to just have fun. Fun matters. When thinking about what kinds of self-care is needed to keep teachers in the classroom it's hard to point to one thing. What I can say is that school is sanctioned or manufactured self-care rarely works. So they're trying to create camaraderie and happiness but it's all forced. You know like the most mischief is funny. It's between two people it's genuine. It's authentic. But it's also important to note that for the teachers who feel exhausted and perpetually behind it might be because they can't take care of themselves. There's likely too much expected of them and the things that would help with self-care like the time and the money to go to the gym or go to the doctor or to see a therapist just aren't there. So it's a cycle. Teachers burn themselves out trying to keep up with impractical expectations and then they try to recover and fill their tank enough during the summer to last another year. Education needs a system that allows for maintenance and I mean authentic maintenance not worksheets and not relying on fourth quarter amnesia to keep teachers coming back because the trend of teachers leaving education is not reversing. So the system needs to adjust. Next episode we come to the end of the school year and I will be making a decision to leave for stay. We'll hear some people change their minds about what's next. Get the popcorn ready because this is some news and we see how everyone handles fourth quarter amnesia. This last month is not the thing that I'm trying to get away from. It's all the other stuff. That will be next time on those who can't teach anymore. If you want more from those who can't teach anymore join our newsletter or check out our website at those who can't teach anymore.com No Oposophy. We also want to hear from you. Teachers are not alone. We go through the same thing. It's just a different kind of the same thing. Tell us what you do to make teaching sustainable. You can email us or send us recording of your response to those who can't teach anymore at gmail.com. No Oposophy. Or you can write your response and review on Apple or Spotify. We'll pick a few responses to share on the podcast. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast and share episodes with everyone you can think of. This episode was produced by me Charles Fornier. It was edited by Melody Edwards. Other editing help came from Nila Greenspan and Jennifer Fornier. Anna Raider does our marketing. All of our music was produced by Julian Separete. And as always thank you so much for listening. [Music]