Sustainable Teachers are Clear Eye-Optimists

The Sustainable Teacher is all about practical ways for a better balance in teaching. Teaching is part psychology, part scholarship, part advertising, part performance and part sharing of your soul. The soil of teaching is relationships. Nobody can learn and grow in a school without strong relationships. To teach well and by that, I mean to be an effective teacher whose efforts make change for young people, you need to be a clear-eyed optimist. Teaching is stepping forward into the future and to do so you need to be hopeful. You need to believe in change - that your students will learn, no matter how many mistakes they make, that colleagues and parents are only human, too, and that you will face-plant quite spectacularly on a regular basis, but you can and will pick yourself up and keep moving forward.

‘Clear-eyed’ is about being pragmatic. There’s an idealised view of the best teachers being those who sacrifice everything for their students. This idea is also associated with the notion of teaching as a calling, something you are destined to be. I think this is rubbish as it’s damaging for the teacher and their students. Teaching is a profession. An excellent profession, but it’s a job. If we buy into the idea that teaching is some sort of noble calling, we put pressure on the students and ourselves to live up to unrealistic expectations. You have a chance to be a key person in a young person’s life for a year or sometimes more. You can teach well and for a sustained period of time, if you have a full and enriching life yourself. If you try to live up to this notion of teacher as noble do-gooder, then I’d bet money you burn out within five years.

By design, teachers are helpful and caring people. We want to look after others and ‘fix’ whatever problems we see. The trick is, we need to teach ourselves to accept responsibility for our role and avoid biting off more than we can manage. It’s inevitable that we will step outside this philosophy from time to time. We will spend extra lunchtimes helping students catch up on work they miss, we will volunteer to manage more extracurricular activities than is our responsibility, we will take on an extra management role without additional time allowance and we will spend our Saturday morning coaching sporting teams, to help out. There is nothing wrong with doing any of these activities to support our students and our school community. But if you’re doing them because you think you ‘should’, you’re feeling overwhelmed and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to switch off, then you need to stop and recalibrate. To be caring, useful and effective for your students, you need to, as they say, put on your own oxygen mask first.

You need to remember that you are just ONE person in a village of people needed to teach, support and grow a young person into their best selves.

There may be people who disagree with my position on this issue and argue that they’re the only ones who can help their students, there is nobody else, etc. Perhaps that’s true, but I challenge them and you to consider that there is always more than just you in a young person’s life and if ‘doing extra’ at school is causing you to feel overwhelmed, then stop, because the greatest gift you can give them is a healthy, balanced self, who has perspective. An older teacher once summed this up by telling me: “The students survived before you arrived, they will survive despite what you do and they will survive when you leave. Teach them the curriculum, have fun, share your joy and always set personal boundaries.”

There have been times, especially in my first few years of teaching, when I felt like I was drowning but I learned how to swim, sometimes treading water and sometimes relying on flotation devices thrown by colleagues, friends and family. Now, when things are feeling a bit tough, I just remind myself to stay afloat, I’ll swim again when I’ve rested and recalibrated.

Image by Yarolsav Shuraev