Excuse me, I am going to rant for just a moment about a fad in the United States education system for a bit. It is a concept called "self-care".
(I tried to hide this behind a spoiler tag, but I can't seem to figure it out. If someone wants to PM me how to do that I'll fix it. Highlighting and hitting the little eye-crossed-out icon doesn't seem to work.)
Background:
My school is going through a process called "High Reliability Schools" (HRS). We want the label for advertising purposes, and honestly, the process requires a really deep look at systems and compares them to some of the best research about what makes an effective school. All good stuff. A good chunk of it relies upon survey data from students and staff around various topics.
One such topic was teacher overall satisfaction and stress levels. As a school we rated ourselves moderately to well satisfied in our jobs and roles. However, on the question of stress every single staff member indicated a high to extreme level. Pretty alarming data tbh. Honesty, it is to he expected. We hire passionate people who are generally perfectionists. We place a high level of rigor and demand on our students and we put in the work to make sure they are successful. There isn't a single person on staff who doesn't stat 2-3 hours late at least once a week, and most of us are here an hour to 45 minutes before our contractual start time. We regularly give up our plan time for students in crisis and to support one another however we can.
That said, our stress does not come from that extra time at work. We give that time because we LOVE our students. We do it because we're excited and passionate about what we do. I don't MIND the extra time I spend planning if I know it'll help a kid in their life. Moreover, I have an AMAZING principal. She puts family first every single time. When a teacher won tickets to Disneyland that also happened to fall on a Parent Teacher Conference night, she worked to reschedule all of that time for another night so he could go. The calendar committee this year chose to not give our school the Rocky's home opener as a day off, but she is STILL letting whomever wants to take the day off to take it, and organizing an alternative schedule so the kids who DO come to school that day are supervised and have fun. I work in an AMAZING PLACE.
However it pisses me off to no end when people start saying, "Well what are you doing for yourself? How are you managing your stress? What else can you be doing for "self care?" Because it's a bullshit question. My stress doesn't come from the basics of my job, the hours, the pay, etc. It comes from everything I have to do that IS NOT GOOD FOR KIDS and shows that society doesn't TRUST that I will do my job.
I have to get 23/26 students ready for a test in April that is:
- Not developmentally appropriate.
- Includes texts that time after time have been shown to be above grade level.
- Lasts for HOURS. Within two weeks in April my 3rd graders will have to sit though 435 minutes of testing in COMPLETE SILENCE. (I can't fucking do that!)
- They have to be able to read texts (see above level) and answer multiple choice questions that are often ambiguous to educators (aka, us, because we pour over the stupid practice tests exhaustively every year to tease out 'what else we can be doing'.) as well as write multi-paragraph literary analysis essays on those texts.
Let me be clear, my students will be 9 and 10 years old when they sit for these tests. 9 and 10. They're not high school or college students. They are still BABIES.
I have to force these assessments down my student's throats because no one trusts me to evaluate if my kids have learned the material that I've been asked to teach.
I am stressed because I am not trusted by the wider educational field. I am stressed because I honestly think these demands are hurting kids, and so much of that "extra" time I'm spending is to try to mitigate the harm.
I am stressed because the backstories of some of my students are heartbreaking. Homelessness, food insecurity, family health issues, divorce, not feeling safe at school (the most recent Colorado school shooting is the school mine branched off of about 6 years ago - not feeling safe is fucking real and there is NOTHING that can be done to ever make me feel completely safe in my classroom again) - it goes on an on and on. There are days my kids aren't here to learn but to be loved, and if they pick up and throw a fucking chair, there is usually a damned good reason why they did it.
I'm stressed because in many ways I'm acting as a social worker and psychologist. The fucking district (which, tbh, I generally love, but there are policies that drive me insane) pulls our mental health provider for at least two hours weekly for "district meetings" and this next week she'll be gone FOR A WEEK. I'm not trained for this, nor am I given anything extra to deal with the second hand trauma.
I'm a teacher of the year, master degree educated, ten year veteran professional. I love my students, I love my career. I take anxiety medications and it's probably time for me to up them again because damn.
Last weekend I spent hours looking at alternate careers for teachers because I'm burning out badly right now. (I don't think I'll ever really leave - I'm terrified of losing the stability that comes with teaching. It would take a lot for me to lose this job, but my husband has gone through the private sector fire-hire roller coaster enough for me to want to engage in it.)
Don't fucking tell me that the "answer" to my stress is to take a bath at night, or read a book I enjoy, or do something "fun".
My stress comes because of the system and telling me that "self-care" is going to somehow fix it is insulting as fuck. The only thing that can lower my stress levels at this point is, "Here is x time, go work to figure out how to make it all fit."
That's never going to happen though.
