Q: I’m an elementary school teacher. Like everyone else, I moved my act online and have done my best to keep my students engaged, learning, and feeling connected. I learned new technology in an instant, figured out some hacks to herd kids who weren’t physically in front of me, and got better at tuning out distractions I couldn’t handle. I mean, these are little kids. I don’t care how good you are at teaching, it’s simply not in a 6-year-old’s wiring to sit for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time looking at a screen, but parents kept begging the school to do more, more, more. Nothing we did was enough. I’m not going to get into parents’ infuriating misperception that we’ve been sitting on our butts doing nothing, though. Anyway, my students would wander off, or make silly faces, or get distracted by a loud construction vehicle or their cat. I’m not complaining. I didn’t sign up to teach robots, and these are just the facts.
But now I’m so tired. Also, I feel like my own kids, who are 7 and 9, constantly get the short end of the stick. I’m lucky in that I have a helpful partner, but he’s working as well, and he’s as tired as I am. Yeah, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, meaning summer. All I want to do is spend time with my family, maybe take a nap or 50 and basically shut down. However, my school district has big ideas about summer training. My principal is keen to meet with each of us individually over Zoom to debrief about this school year and talk about what we plan to do in the next couple of months to help us manage remote learning more successfully this fall. I don’t think anyone expects us to be back in the classroom full time. On top of his expectations, I’ll have to attend a certain number of mandatory professional development sessions. Objectively speaking, it may not amount to much more than I normally do during the summer, but I simply don’t have anything left to give. I am running on empty, my kids’ camp was just canceled to boot, and I’m contemplating quitting so that I won’t have to do any training at all. For real. I know that’s extreme, which is why I’m writing to you. Refusing to do the professional development stuff is not a viable option. What do you recommend I do?
A: In a word, nothing. You’re fried. This is not the time to make major decisions about your career. When you meet with your principal, share how depleted and low you’re feeling. He might have some suggestions or simply reassure you that he’d much rather give you space and time to breathe than lose a good teacher. Take a few minutes to look into the training requirements, too. Get a sense of when they’re being offered. You might discover that they’re being held later in the summer, or that you can schedule them on your own time.
You’re not only exhausted, you’re stressed and feel like you have too many balls in the air. You just found out your kids have no summer plans, and that information came on the heels of months of feeling like you weren’t meeting their needs. Try to separate your current emotions from your long-term career goals. The negative feelings are temporary, and you might regret making a big life decision when you’re spent and feeling guilty and overwhelmed.
In the unlikely event that you discover that training begins immediately and will consume your entire summer, contact someone in human resources about your options. Taking leave, for instance, is a far less drastic choice than quitting your job. Remember, too, that remote learning won’t last forever, and that, eventually, both you and your children will physically return to school. Try to envision that moment and how you might feel. That exercise could give you some good information. In the meantime, summer is around the corner. Use the beginning of the break to focus on self-care, relaxing, getting outside and spending time offline with your family. You can reassess the situation once you’ve had a chance to recharge.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Phyllis L. Fagell
Phyllis L. Fagell is the school counselor at Landon School in Washington, D.C., a therapist at the Chrysalis Group in Bethesda, Md., and the author of the Career Confidential blog. She is also the author of Middle School Matters and Middle School Superpowers, available at https://amzn.to/3Pw0pcu.
