Burning the Candle at Both Ends
“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”
– Anne Zamott
The Labour of Teaching
It’s no secret that a placement in teaching is one of the most challenging, time-consuming and horror story-inducing placements a student could possibly venture on. From detailed lesson plans to mountains of photocopying, teachers are expected to work more overtime, during breaks and produce the highest levels of unpaid labour, with the TUC finding teachers putting in an average of 11.2 hours a week. [1]
No big task for me, I naively thought, sauntering into St Mary’s Christian Brother’s Grammar School in September with a pep in my step. Well, the reality that teachers face, smacked me square up the jaw as I felt the brunt of burnout. Defined as “an extreme reaction that individuals experience when they cannot successfully cope with work pressure”, burnout is a physical, emotional and phycological response that is unfortunately all too common among teachers. [2]
This isn’t to say I stared the beast down that was a teaching placement workload without any armour or preparation. My AEL3001 module and the library’s extensive resources loaded me with the tools and strategies I needed to face such a workload head on. In this blog post, I’ll detail my experience with an overwhelming workload on placement, overcoming placement burnout and how reflective practices allowed me to put better strategies in place to manage my time (and my head) whilst on placement.
The Curse of the Late-Night Marking
Two weeks. It took just two short weeks before I had to face what seemed an irrefutable fact of teaching… all teachers must mark until the early hours of the morning when their eyes give up on them and they finally get a wink of sleep. It was a blast at the start, setting assignments, telling students to finish off what they didn’t get done in class at home, and keeping the learning going for as long as I possibly could. As many pedagogical experts such as Bempechat agree, “homework plays a critical, long-term role in the development of children’s achievement motivation”, therefore it’s vital in my practice. [3]
But it all would eventually come back to bite me, and before I knew it, I was carrying file blocks home worth of homework and essays and marking on buses on my days off. Two stars and a wish began circling my brain like little blue birds chirping in cartoons when the character gets a concussion.
Enough is Enough!
It all accumulated in one defining incident that I would bet every student in a teaching placement would recognise, what I like to call, the ‘Big Angry Cry’. Quite simply, imagine me in a cubicle, an hour before the bell would go, knowing I still had homework to mark, lessons to set up for and that’s when I began the ‘Big Angry Cry’. That was the incident I thought enough was enough and I had reached the end of my candle.
“These demands take a toll, resulting in job dissatisfaction, workplace fatigue, burnout, and reduced occupational commitment.” [5]
Christopher Jay McCarthy, “Teacher Stress: Balancing Demands and Resources.”(2019)
Reflection…
My module leads and academics such as Pollard taught me the importance of reflective practice within placement, “becoming an effective teacher has a great deal to do with learning how to support, manage and develop oneself”. [4] So when I went home that night, I sat down and asked myself those valuable questions. Using Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle (1988), I tasked myself with journaling my feelings.
Dealing with My Feelings
Using the model, I looked at what had happened in the cubicle, and I needed to dissect what I had felt when I began to cry.
I was ultimately frustrated and felt like as the singer Anna Nalick puts it, life was like an hourglass glued to the table… I never seemed to have enough time. As horrible as crying on placement is, I was able to realise through reflecting that the incident allowed me to realise that I had had enough, and that was ok. Sometimes hitting a perceived rock bottom lets you realise you can only move upward and that’s exactly what I wanted to do.
Now What?
Further analysing my situation, I realised that I could have been managing my time better. If there wasn’t enough time in the day, I had to make some, cut some corners, and alleviate my workload. If it takes a village to raise a child, what must it take to educate an entire school?
I didn’t have to be doing everything by myself and that night I wrote down a list of strategies I would put in place to make sure the toilet never caught me crying again.
McCarthy talks about two different types of coping mechanisms for teachers dealing with the overwhelm of burnout, “problem-focused coping” and “emotion-focused coping”. [6]
Asking For Help
Using McCarthy’s categories, I began to make my action plan based on Gibbs’ cycle.
Emotion-based coping (managing the emotions caused by burnout): I decided a quick chat with my supervisor and mentor would be step no.1. She too was once in my shoes, and it was vital I felt able to lean on her for emotional support. I admitted to her that I was struggling, and she reassured me it’d be weird if I wasn’t.
Problem-based coping (managing the situation that led to the burnout): She also introduced me to the wonderful Gary, Gary from Reprographics. If ever I found myself making 21 poetry booklets, it was Gary’s job to have them done for the next day, all I had to do was ask.
Next, through reflection, I realised leaving the bulk of my paperwork until the end of the day was a further strain on my brain and it exhausted me beyond productivity. And so, I came to work an hour early, instead of leaving an hour late. Was it totally fair to be there longer than required? Of course not, but it was more important to me to maintain a work-life balance, and that meant only marking while I was on school property and refusing to take it home with me.
Moving Forward…
The pressure on teachers is an unavoidable truth, but I’m happy to announce that I am yet to have another run-in with the ‘Big Angry Cry’. Through reflection, I was able to turn a humiliating and hard experience into a chance to change my situation. Furthermore, by analysing how I was feeling, I realised it was too hard for me to feel everything all by myself.
References
[1] Henshaw, P. (2022) Workload crisis – 11.2 hours of unpaid overtime a week, Headteacher Update. Available at: https://www.headteacher-update.com/news/workload-crisis-11-2-hours-of-unpaid-overtime-a-week-teachers-schools-education-tuc-work-your-proper-hours-day-1/244751/ (Accessed: April 15, 2023).
[2] Yu, X. et al. (2015) “The Effect of Work Stress on Job Burnout Among Teachers: The Mediating Role of Self-Efficacy.” Social Indicators Research, vol. 122, no. 3, 2015, pp. 701–08. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24721572. (Accessed: April 15, 2023).
[3] Bempechat, J. (2004) “The Motivational Benefits of Homework: A Social-Cognitive Perspective.” Theory Into Practice, vol. 43, no. 3, 2004, pp. 189–96. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3701520. (Accessed: April 15, 2023).
[4] Pollard, A. (2019) Reflective teaching in schools. 5th edition. Bloomsbury Academic (Reflective teaching). Available at: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat02616a&AN=qub.b22819551&site=eds-live&scope=site (Accessed: April 15, 2023).
[5] McCarthy, C. (2019) “Teacher Stress: Balancing Demands and Resources.” The Phi Delta Kappan, vol. 101, no. 3, 2019, pp. 8–14. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26837675. (Accessed: April 15, 2023.)
[6] ibid.
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