What the Teacher Did Next

I’m not officially unemployed yet (just one signature away), but today is the day that my class find out that I won’t be teaching them anymore.  Some of them will be indifferent to this, one or two may be pleased, but others – the ones who need some stability in their lives – are going to feel like I walked out on them….because I did.  I walked out on them.  I didn’t want to.  I just had nothing left to give.

They’re a lively bunch, but it didn’t take long for them to get under my skin.  There are so many conflicting pressures in teaching, but I tried to make those relationships a priority, I really did.  So today I feel guilty.

I’ve only recently begun to open up about my depression and anxiety.  It’s been stalking me for the past year (with increasingly malicious intent), but apart from my husband and my GP, I didn’t tell anybody.  Heartbreakingly, my own children worked it out for themselves – I guess it’s hard not to notice when your mum keeps bursting into tears during mealtimes. Of course this only adds to the guilt. Other people knew I was feeling stressed, but stress is so endemic in today’s society, it barely registers.  I worked hard to hide the extent to which I was struggling until it reached crisis point, and by then it was too late to save my job.

The question is; would things have worked out differently if I’d opened up earlier?  I’m not so sure.  I’ve suffered low moods before, but nothing that I couldn’t come back from with a bit of CBT based self-help.  This was the first time I’d been unable to dig myself out of the hole, so turning to medication was a big deal for me (maybe this is just me buying into the stigma, I don’t know).  But when you start talking to people more openly, you find it’s actually a pretty standard coping mechanism these days.

It seems that teaching has become a sink or swim profession: you can either hack it, or you can’t.  Those who can’t have three options available to them: use anti-depressants or some other buoyancy aid to keep afloat; get out of the water; or drown.  I’ve only been in teaching for 4 years, but have already seen too many colleagues go under.

There seem to be three different schools of thought as to why this is:

1. The pressures teachers face today are unsustainable
2. Teachers need to take more responsibility for self-care
3. Teaching is not for everyone (AKA Not everyone is cut out for teaching OR Teaching is a unique profession)

Personally, whilst I think teachers need to ensure that they prioritise self-care (see my post on Teacher Burnout: The Little House of Blame), the demands of the job sometimes make this feel impossible.

The argument I find the most worrying is that teaching is not for everyone.  Not only does this imply that the teachers who go under do so because of some flaw in their character, it also suggests that the current workload and pressures are entirely reasonable.

Am I happy for the teachers who love their work and can maintain some sort of work-life-balance into the bargain?  Of course I am.  But that doesn’t mean that they were born to teach and the rest of us are imposters: doomed to fail, due to our own inadequacies.  The problems faced by teachers are systemic.  We can only overcome them if we stick together.  If a teacher is struggling, throw them a lifeline.  Swimming upstream is exhausting and even the strongest swimmers tire eventually.