A colleague of mine, Dania, recently shared a thoughtful reflection about teacher exhaustion, and it resonated deeply with me.
We expect teachers to be endlessly patient, creative, enthusiastic, adaptable and available.
We ask them to plan excellent lessons, manage challenging and often inappropriate behaviour, respond to parents, attend meetings, complete endless (and often meaningless) paperwork, support vulnerable young people and deal with the countless “small” tasks that quietly fill every remaining corner of the day.
Yet, somewhere among all these expectations, we sometimes forget something rather important:
Teachers are human beings before they are professionals.
You can care deeply about your pupils and still feel exhausted.
You can be passionate about education and still struggle on a Monday morning; especially when the day began with a strength-training session squeezed into the only available space in what feels like the fifth exceptionally busy week in a row. Entirely self-inflicted, I admit, but still worthy of consideration.
You can give everything you reasonably have and still wonder whether it was enough.
None of this makes you a poor or less committed teacher. It simply makes you human.
Of course, organisation and time management matter. But sometimes the problem is not how well teachers manage their time. Sometimes, quite simply, too much is being asked of one person within the time available.
Inspired by a thoughtful post from Dania.
