People seek the perfect work/life balance as if it were the fountain of youth. In a profession such as teaching, people long for the ability to come home from work without bringing work home with them, long for something that seems incongruous with doing the best we can for those in our care. If you discern a similar theme in my recent posts, you’re spot on. I often think about what I can possibly do to better balance by work obligations with the rest of my life.
Before I dive into the things currently weighing down my work/life scale, I want to acknowledge the inadequacy of the very term “work/life balance.” To use that term without acknowledging its inadequacies would be equal to declaring my work as an educator to be separate from the rest of my life. However, as I will discuss in the remainder of this essay, the problem comes when I fail to prevent my job obligations from creeping into every corner of my life.
As I have discussed before, I have taken on a number of voluntary obligations for my job. Those obligations have consumed my time at an unforeseen rate. Thus, a few weeks ago, I began culling some of these obligations. The time zap continues at a frenetic pace.
I find two primary culprits for the time suck: the hamster wheel of lesson preparation and assignment grading as well as the deep emotional investment in the welfare of my students. I will describe the former first.
Although at times I am inconsistent, I have made an effort to grade things on the days that students turn in work, knowing that the moment I put off that work, the snowball starts to roll down the hill, ready to crush me as I stand at the bottom. Even so, the past three weekends, I have spent hours on Saturday building materials for both of my lesson preps and finalizing lesson plans. I have crossed significant numbers of items off my to do list, leaving only a few items, one of which is “clear my to review list” aka grade papers. Ideally this should not take long but in reality it takes several hours at least. The day I wrote this essay, I graded one class period and a half out of four. This took nearly three hours. Some of the other involuntary obligations put on the plate of all teachers include lesson plans dressed to the nines, discipline logs, faculty meetings, parent conferences, professional development, testing schedules and any changes that come along with those changes and many others. These things are not going away. I need to figure out how to manage those obligations. I have not yet.
The emotional investment came collecting the Friday before I wrote this post, I will not divulge the details of a particular situation except to say that it involved the safety and well being of one of my students and another teacher in the building. I took my concern to the guidance counselor who told me that I should take this to the principal. TO make a long story short, if I had not diligently pursued her, the principal likely would have chosen to ignore the situation entirely. Then, Friday, the day after I reported the incident, at a short faculty meeting, she spoke of this teacher in glowing terms. This infuriated me because all evidence now points to the principal’s misinterpretation of all the reports as malicious gossip out to target this teacher at the expense of potential student safety. I went directly from there to a hectic Model UN meeting where I continued to frantically rush back and forth between the media center and my room to grab pictures for their project boards. By the time I got home after also making a Costco run, I sat down and could not keep my eyes open. Rather than plugging away and getting any work done, I crashed. Hard. This crash lasted through the night, into the morning and even after my run.
By the time I recovered, it was after one o’clock. The lack of time left in the day and the workload ahead threatened to overwhelm me. Each time I knocked something off the list, the list appeared to grow longer. That’s when I knew that I cannot keep this up.
Clearly, right now, the scale tips on all fronts towards work so far that the balance threatens to tip over and crash to the floor. As soon as I noticed, I started to take steps to right the balance. I tried an experiment, still in the testing phase, where I would finish whatever school related tasks I could up until 9 o’clock and then stop. In that last hour before bed, I decompress. I journal. I curl up on a couch and read a good book. The first time that I did this, I woke the next morning feeling completely refreshed despite the fact that I still got up at 5 to work out after the same amount of sleep as a normal week night. I relished that feeling.
So, as is often the case with all my entries which are far more reflective than prescriptive, I have no specific answers or magical solutions for the dilemma. If I did, I would have nothing to write about. At the end of it all though, after all the reflection, I come to the two-fold conclusion that I am heavily emotionally invested in my work which has a cost and also, this emotional investment can produce enormous dividends, if managed well.