Breaking Point: A teacher’s experience of burnout
Mel*, an English teacher in the North of England, shares her experience of “burnout”.
I didn’t use the word burnout** at the time, but by the end of my first year as a newly qualified teacher there was a big heap of ashes where my well-being had once been. Looking back at it now, the thing that surprises me the most is how bad things got before I noticed it, and how much I was willing to give up as a normal part of teaching. Evenings, early mornings, weekends, sleep…. I saw it all as the standard price of the job.
My NQT year was in a school in special measures in a busy English department whose only other full-time member of staff was also an NQT. (In other words, all the non-NQT members of staff were working full-time to manage their ‘part-time’ workloads). We were constantly being inspected by Ofsted and Mock-Ofsted in a regime that prized extensive planning and paper-trails. (Thankfully, culture in schools has moved on in lots of positive ways since those days).
Brimming over with the excitement of being a teacher, it was very hard to see the requirements of my job objectively. I followed all the planning and marking and disciplinary policies of the school enthusiastically, and was very slow to spot any signs that those policies might not be working or that they were a mismanagement of finite and precious energies and resources. I didn’t perceive the realities of the culture around me very well. Neither did I perceive my own limits well. Teaching was my first ‘proper’ job after uni. And so when it was difficult I tried the strategy that had served me well throughout my school career: trying harder, putting more and more hours in. I was also full of the desire to make a difference for my students, which was another reason to hold nothing back, to do my absolute best. At the end of my first term, amid many marking deadlines, I somehow decided that I wanted to bake over three hundred Christmas sugar cookies. One for each of my students. Fast forward to the summer term and I remember sitting listlessly, looking at my computer, trying and failing to plan a year 8 lesson. I knew something was wrong because I could no longer come up with a single idea. My powerpoints and my brain were empty. All out of fuel.
Looking back, maybe it would be fair to say that a naive idealism was what prevented me from getting off the burnout train. I was naive about my own limitations (my need for sleep, effective support and a healthy work-life balance) and I didn’t want to accept that perhaps my school was bad for me. That not all teachers can thrive in all schools. I thought I could keep on pushing and that my brain and body would mutely absorb the cost again and again, and still be ready for more. The reality was that I couldn’t thrive in that kind of environment. In fact I could barely survive it. I learnt that my body and brain - far from being a credit card with a limitless overdraft, had been keeping hold of all the receipts. That there were big debts to my own physical, mental and emotional well-being that needed repaying. Stress and overwork has a cost. Sadly that cost is often minimised or ignored, but it never goes away.
Most teachers see their work as a form of vocation, and most of us have a high threshold of what we consider acceptable stress and pressure. Most of us expect to work very long hours, for at least the pressure points of term, if not more regularly. That can mean that it’s easy to dismiss signs of burnout - after all, are there any teachers who aren’t exhausted, who don’t find themselves procrastinating as a way of avoiding all the work that needs to be done that weekend? Are there any teachers who don’t have bad weeks? Are there any teachers who get enough sleep?
Where we are on the stress spectrum can be hard to discern, and even when we do identify that things need to change, there are often no easy solutions, practically speaking. Yet I want to finish on two notes of hope that the gospel brings.
First, Christians can admit to being finite and needing support knowing that our limitations are part of God’s good design, not a sign of failure. There is only one person who doesn’t need to rest in the world and he is not us! The gospel paves the way for us to see boundary setting and stewarding our energies wisely as a good thing - as a humane way of living that honours God because it is true to the way he designed us. It emboldens us to believe that we will actually be better teachers when we are rested, because when we are no longer treadmilling the hamster wheel, we are more human. And when we are more human, we are better able to connect with the human students in front of us.
Secondly, a Christian perspective encourages us that in God’s economy our efforts are never wasted, even when it looks like we have achieved very little. ‘Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain’, the Psalmist writes, ‘It is in vain that you rise up early and go to bed late … for he gives to his beloved sleep’. (Psalm 127: 1-2). Even in the most exhausting of terms, we can trust that God has been working his purposes through us, in unseen yet powerful ways. God is faithful to use the work of our hands, not in spite of our limitations, but through them. We can take comfort in knowing that God works through our weakness, and remembering that we are jars of clay, we can choose to see our fragility as a pointer to God’s ‘power’.
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*Mel is not the author’s real name
**We’ve used burnout in this article to mean a variety of symptoms that arise after a prolonged period of occupational stress, and that result in a reduced ability to function in everyday life and to experience happiness. This kind of stress is experienced differently from person to person, and all those experiences are valid and important.