Are you a teacher who is feeling stressed out and overwhelmed? do you worry that you're feeling symptoms of burnout - or are you sure you've already gotten there? Have you started to dream of doing something different or a new job or perhaps pursuing an entirely different career - but you don't know what else you're qualified to do? You don't know how to start a job search and you just feel stuck. If that sounds like you, I promise you are not alone. my name is Vanessa Jackson; and I am a career transition and job search coach and I specialize in helping burnt out teachers just like you deal with the overwhelmingly stressful nature of your day-to-day job and to consider what other careers might be out there waiting for you. You might ask yourself, What tools do I need to find a new career? Are my skills valuable outside the classroom? How and where do I even get started? These are all questions you deserve answers to, and I can help you find them. I’m Vanessa Jackson. Come and join me for Teachers in Transition.
***Hi! And Welcome back to another episode of Teachers in Transition. I am your host, Vanessa Jackson – I’m a career transition and job search coach specializing in teachers. I am here to help you reach your goals and figure out how to navigate the journey from stressed overwhelmed and burnt-out teacher to the career of your dreams with margins in your life to spend with your family, your pets, and whatever else you want to. I provide tips and suggestions to help with stress and mental health, hacks to help your day, and job-hunting tips. If you are frustrated with your current teaching position, if you are stressed, overwhelmed, and burned out you are in the right place – I am so glad you are here. Today on the podcast, I am going to talk about the importance of slowing down and caring for yourself as school lets out, the cold hard math on just how much teachers work – so you can use that people give you the “summers off” comments. We’ll also talk about how fear can hold us back from stepping out of our comfort zones, and we’ll wrap up with some fun hacks with POOL NOODLES.
It’s Memorial Day weekend as I write and record this. So I do want to acknowledge all of those who have gone before in our military and paid the ultimate price. And I also want to acknowledge the families that are left to pick up the pieces. May we all be worthy of their sacrifice
For a lot of teachers, Memorial Day Weekend is the end of school year. It makes a natural break. I like to say that you can tell a great deal about a district based on whether it finishes so that the Friday before is the last day for teachers, then they are allowing them the opportunity to actually relax on that weekend. If they make Friday the last day for kids and require staff to come back the Tuesday (or worse, Tuesday and more days!) after to finish up the Annual End of the Year Scavenger Hunt. Do any of you out there belong to a district that actually sent you to professional development after the last day of school? On the one hand, WHAT were they thinking? No one is absorbing anything useful. On the other hand – if you want honest opinions, there is no better time to get them than when the teachers are exhausted and the filter has slipped.
Make sure you take some time for YOU and relax. If you are home with kids over the summer, enjoy them. They grow up fast, and when that’s over, you’ll find you miss it. If your kids have been particularly annoying to you, you’ll find that that it’s a little easier to deal with everyone around you once you have had the opportunity to rest and recharge a little.
Oddly enough, I’m going to suggest that the first thing you do is sit down with your schedule and sketch out the summer – who has summer camp, mark down those doctor appointments, dentist appointments, optometrist appointments, any conferences, when the Deadpool movie is being released (July 26!!), and ANYthing else that is a larger rock.
And prioritize relaxation - especially in the beginning of the break.
There are lots of different ways to relax.
Self-care rituals like a massage, a stretch, exercise, a mani/pedi, haircut, a FLOAT, time at the GYM, a porch swing, a walk in the morning, coffee in the morning withOUT morning duty!
Consider an art project of some kind. Art comes in many forms – textile arts like sewing, quilting, knit and crochet,
The Art of Nature – grow things, piddle in the yard, spend time outside (in the morning or LATE evening if you live in a state like Texas where it is already trying to cook us).
DIY arts – that very satisfactory moment where you get something done. I got a wild plan one summer and put up crown molding. Not sure what I was thinking, but I sure wasn’t thinking I had limits.
What we traditionally consider as art – paint something at one of those paint places. Or paint something in your home (at your home if you don’t own it.) I spent three weeks during a time that my husband was deployed and I painted an accent wall. I’ll try to get a picture or a link to a picture in the show notes. It was inspired by the artist Mondrian but with a completely different color palette. For those you unfamiliar with Mondrian, he had straight line geometric paintings with some of the squares and rectangles in blue, yellow, and red. ALL of my squares and rectangles were colored in with blue, yellow, red, and green. 170 square feet of wall. I loved that thing and it made me smile everytime I saw it.
I know that most teachers use the summer to try and catch up from all the things that were neglected during the school year – usually yourself and your home. This is a great time to take care of you. Most teachers are slamming doctor’s appointments during the summer one after the other. You have to take of you. You have to live with you for the rest of your life. Make sure you are still fully functional. If you have the funds, consider having someone come in and clean to get you caught up. If you have kids, consider what we used to call around our house chorepalooza – kids could do as many or as few chores as they wanted off a list. All chores had value. It gave them nice starting off the summer money, and I wasn’t as far behind.
Let me illustrate with a story why it is so important to slow down.
There is a story of someone who was exploring Australia and their party was traveling with some aboriginal guides. They’d been pushing hard trying to get some place or another. At one point, the guides just stopped. And they refused to move on. Their explanation was they needed to rest to let their souls catch up with their bodies.
That makes a lot of sense to me. I love numbers, and I watched someone else do the math. Someone working 40 hours a week will work 2080 hours a year. This assumes no days off for holidays or vacation. 40 hours a week for 52 weeks. 2,080 hours. That covers 260 weekdays in there. Most corporate jobs offer at least 10 days PTO (paid time off) a year. I had 15. So let’s subtract 80 hours from that. 2000 hours even. There are also a minimum of 6 paid holidays, and most companies have 8. So let’s use the minimum here and we’ll just subtract another 48 hours from the total. That’s 1,952 hours a corporate America worker expects to be in the office in 260 days of the year. 1,952. Remember that number.
In my last year of teaching, I was essentially working all the time. I remember bringing my laptop from home so that I could input grades on one, and while that one was processing, I could turn to the school laptop and enter some grades or Canvas lessons there, so that there was no time lost to processing. No one should have to work under those sorts of time constraints. I worked 65 hours a week that last year, maybe 70, and many of my Saturdays were also taken up with this or that because I was a music teacher – although there was a lot less of that in the pandemic. Teachers work on contracts that are around 180 days. I’ve had contracts that went to 190, but let’s use 180. That’s just 1,520 for an 8 hours day. We work about 73% the amount of time as “real” workers. That sounds GREAT!
But it’s not.
Let’s do our own math. If you are like most teachers, you are at your school EASILY 9 to 9.5 hours, and you’ll work another hour or two at home. Because let’s not forget that nowadays in non-union states, most of the weekly staff meetings take place OUTSIDE the normal workday. More likely, you save all that extra up and slam it in on a weekend. Teachers are salaried with practically no hope of a bonus and certainly no hope of a commission. You get what you get, and you often won’t really know what that is until the next school year starts. Let’s go with a 50 hourduring the workweek which is the low end, and add another 5 on the weekend – so a 55-hour week on job duties. Divide the 55 by 5 for an avg time to keep it easy and we end up with 11 times 180 actually working days which comes out to: 1,980 hours. Wow. So basically, a teacher works 28 hours MORE in essentially ¾ of the time than the average corporate America worker does. (73% if you’re feeling pedantic)
No wonder you’re tired at the end of the year.
Sorry about all the math, but it is also around this time of year that people start making their uneducated comments about how teachers have it easy because we have summers off. Uh, no. The cold, hard math clearly doesn’t support that. Feel free to hit them with this. Usually the time after Spring Break and on to the end of the year are brutal times for teachers. You absolutely need to take some time and let your soul catch up with your body.
Tell people No from time to time. This is why I suggested you have that master calendar. It's time to normalize looking at the calendar and not trying to cram 27 hours of stuff in a 24 hour day.
And now I am going to jump right into job hunting tips, because a lot of you are sitting there at the end of the year trying to decide if you’re going to go back into the classroom or not. And you’ll job hunt. And if you don’t find something by the time school rolls around again, you might find yourself back in the classroom. But that doesn’t mean you give up on the dream of leaving for something else. It just means that you need to be very strategic about what you are up for.
Some of you aren’t sure what you want to do. You’re stuck in step 1 which is the DECIDE phase of the roadmap.
Much like childbirth, we forget how bad we felt in the moment as we look back and have some distance from the event. Sometimes you just need a new place to go teach. Sometimes you need to move on from teaching altogether
- because you have made the decision that you have finished your last year – whether that’s at your current location or you need to move on , it is very much time to devote time to the job hunt. This is a GREAT time to be delving into what you would want in your dream job – because that part isn’t about the job – it’s about YOU.
And a lot of times people stay in teaching because the thought of leaving makes them afraid. And it’s absolutely OK to be afraid. There’s a clip out there of Chris Evans on Jimmy Kimmel’s show talking about what it took for him to agree to be Captain America. I am a huge fan of Evan’s Captain America. In this clip he talks about how he wasn’t sure if he should do it because at the time it was a 9-picture deal. Chris Evans deals with some social anxiety (like many of us). He stated that with the one-off movies, one could take time to rest, recharge, and get away from any toxicity. With contracting to play the same role in so many movies, it wouldn’t matter if your anxiety was flaring up – you’d have to suit up and get in there anyway. This is a feeling that teachers know and know well. Marvel really thought Chris would be a great Cap and asked him multiple times to consider the role. And it wasn’t like no one else wanted this part. Marvel was on the rise – Robert Downey Jr ‘s career was reborn with Iron Man, and Chris Hemsworth was launched to A-list status after landing the role of Thor. Sebastian Stan, John Krasinski and Jensen Ackles were all almost Cap. And I bet they’d have done a good job. But Chris Evans did a GREAT job. **happy sigh**
Chris Evans ultimately took the role of Captain America because he realized that all that was preventing him was fear. I, for one, am eternally grateful that he took that chance.
Success doesn’t live inside our comfort zones, my friends. You have to step out and do the scary things. I find it most useful to square my shoulders, take a deep breath and just do the thing.
And remember, you don’t have to do it alone. Podcasts and articles can be a great help, but working with a coach can really help you refine your results.
A coach can give you perspective, helping you see what you might not be able to see, or help you look at things in different ways. They provide personalized guidance and support which helps you to explore new avenues and builds confidence. If you aren’t getting the results you want on your own – it may be time to consider calling in support.
But now it’s time for our teacher hack. These hacks are designed to help you make your life a little easier in some way to create mental, and/or emotional space for you to spend time on YOU to work on YOU. Today’s hack is a hack designed make things a tiny bit quieter in your environment. Disclaimer here – I am not claiming it will make it QUIET. Just quiet – ER. Let me introduce you to the wonders of Pool Noodles. These items are inexpensive and versatile. Here are a few ideas:
1. Slice one edge and fit it around cabinets or doors that other household members are likely to slam.
2. Wrap it on corners or legs of tables and sych where heads or shins might get bonked.
3. Wrap a short section on a bucket with a wire handle – that doesn’t make anything quieter – it just seemed like fun
4. use a pool noodle as a garden mat to save your knees of even if yu’re just on the floor cleaning or something – these floors hurt my knees.
And this is my favorite, but probably the hardest – cut a pool noodle into 2-3-inch sections and make a sound wall to dampen the sound in large spaces. I saw a really interesting video about this that I’ll link in the show notes. She had covered what looked like a 4 X 16-foot section of bulletin board with these pieces of pool noodle. She used two colors and spelled out the word LISTEN. I was thinking that I could make all sorts of designs with Pool Noodle Pointillism. If you didn’t want to put that sort of thing on a wall, you could use the slices of pool noodle in colors to encourage kids to make quiet art. There are probably 1000 things you can do with a pool noodle – if you Google, there is definitely a rabbit hole of fun. I know that I am already planning the very large pool noodle spider for my yard for Halloween!
Thank you for listening!
If you know other teachers who are stressed, overwhelmed, and burned out, share this podcast with them. So many people feel alone and despondent about their situation, my goal is to help as many teachers as possible to find jobs they love where valued and appreciated
I would love to help be your guide and coach you through this journey. You can reach out for a complimentary discovery call. You can book a time from the website which you can find at TeachersInTransition.Com, you can leave a voicemail message at 512-640-9099, and you can email me at TeachersInTransitionCoaching@Gmail.com. And feel free to join us our Facebook group – you can search for Teachers In Transition Podcast club, and we’ll pop right up.
When you’re ready, I’m here, but remember, The best time to start working on your transition plan was about six months ago. The next best time is now!
That’s the podcast for today! If you liked this podcast, tell a friend, and don’t forget to rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Tune in weekly to Teachers in Transition where we discuss Job Search strategies as well as stress management techniques. And I want to hear from you! Please reach out and leave me a message at Teacher in transition coaching at gmail dot com. You can also leave a voicemail or text at 512-640-9099.
I’ll see you here again next week and remember – YOU are amazing!