I Can’t Do This Any More
…I’m Just Burning Out.
Midway through Term 3 of 2022, I did something I have never done before as a teacher. I looked at the class I was teaching, and then at the class I would be teaching in 2023 and thought “I don’t want to do this anymore”.
Now, that might seem mild, but it was the first time in fifteen years of being involved in education that it had happened. No matter how tough the class, and how stressful the year had been — I was always sure that getting to the summer, refreshing and recharging, and taking on board some new ideas would see me through whatever lay ahead. And here I was, not 75% of the year gone, and I realised I simply did not have what it took to do it for a sixteenth year.
I was burned out, and I didn’t realise how burned out I was until I went to my GP, asked for eight weeks of medical leave and some anti-depressants, and handed in my resignation. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t do 2023, I couldn’t continue in 2022. I hadn’t been sleeping properly for months, I got the shakes sometimes, and my solution to any problem was just to put a few more hours of work in, because surely all I needed to do was work a bit harder and things would come right, things would be OK, everything would be fine. Except it wasn’t. I was in a real mess.
I spent the first two weeks of my medical leave terrified. Every door slam out in the street, and every car pulling up was somebody coming to tell me to stop being so silly and get back to work. I felt ashamed for having abandoned my class, worried about what people I knew would think of me, and scared of being seen outside during school hours in case someone asked me what I was doing. In short, I was seriously mentally unwell but had been masking it by turning myself into a machine for my job, and not necessarily a good machine either.
I want to say here, that my colleagues at my last job are some fantastic teachers, who were incredibly supportive when I burned out. They were supportive professionals who are wholly committed to teaching, even under the extreme pressures of the job, exacerbated by COVID-19. This wasn’t just one workplace or a sudden moment of clarity. It may have felt like it at the time, but the more I reflect I realised it wasn’t like that at all. More it was a gradual degradation, a slow slip made up of hundreds or thousands of little moments in the last five years of my career that eventually thundered down and completely wiped me out.
There’s a lot of talk about teacher pay, especially today as the teachers are on strike. I was earning top-scale, which is a decent wage for a 36-hour-a-week job. Except obviously teaching is not a 36-hour-a-week job. It’s more than that. It’s evenings, and weekends and yes, during holidays.
Often the time during holidays, when educating children isn’t the priority, is catch-up time. Time to update and reflect on planning, mark assessments or collate data, finally do that professional reading for your meetings, sort out your classroom or update your behaviour and education plans for individual students, devise entirely new plans for the term ahead in both long and short-term formats, ensure all of your folders have the right copies of the right documents in, should anyone want to see them. It’s reading up on the medical or psychological conditions your students may have been diagnosed with, or trying to find resources that can maybe help that one kid you’ve been tearing your hair out over. You will notice that this is a long list of things, and they cannot be done between 9am and 3pm on a Monday to Friday. Because that’s when we are teaching your children, and legally responsible for their safety and wellbeing. This is part of the job.
Safety & Wellbeing
We’re also responsible for our safety and well-being. The first time I was hit by a chair thrown by a student was during my teacher training. Afterwards the principal told me the same student had once bitten her arm so hard it drew blood through a leather jacket. That was a long time ago, and in another country. I’ve been relatively fortunate in my career, but in the last five years, I have been rabbit-punched in the kidneys by a new entrant (surprisingly strong, incredible hand speed), punched in the stomach by a senior primary student, had to dodge all manner of resources aimed at my head from various students, and had panic attacks thinking about it afterwards. I’ve been spat at, scratched, and sworn at so many times I lose count. Is this part of the job?
Most of the students who you encounter in these situations need help. Many of them have experienced trauma or neglect, or have educational, psychological, or just global special needs which are simply unable to be met because the education system in this country does not have the resources to deal with them. Every teacher knows the situation with ORS funding is a joke, that our SENCO’s and the support workers are overworked.
You can have a student with extremely high needs who needs one-to-one support at all time — but you’ll never get funding for that. One professional in the sphere advised that to get full-time ORS funding, you’d need the student to be in an iron lung. I’m not sure if they were joking or not. So that’s you, doing that one-to-one role, while also teaching 20+ other students. Does that sound bad? OK, now imagine you’ve got two or three students like that in your class. That is a reality for many teachers in NZ today.
But you’re a teacher, you’re passionate about doing your job, so you try and do the best you can with what you’ve got. Except your best means committing a bit more time to ensure that student, or those students, meet a basic requirement of safety and care in your class or school — which means the rest of your class isn’t getting your attention. Eventually you start trying to work out how much teaching you can do around behaviour management, and you find yourselves relieved when certain students are away sick or don’t turn up in the morning because it means you can actually deliver the planned learning to the whole class that day.
And then you feel guilty, and you’re right to feel guilty. These are children, your responsibility is to care for them and educate them, and there you are hoping for an absence on the roll so you can spend your time doing your job as a teacher for the rest of the class. And suddenly you can’t stop thinking:
Are you going to have to make all of your students leave the classroom because someone goes exothermic and starts turning tables and tossing chairs? How much time are you going to spend out of the classroom trying to convince them to come back inside or at least stay in sight so you can maintain the barest sense of responsibility over them? How much additional reporting paperwork are you going to have to do to explain in detail why your classroom displays are ripped down and three students have been punched at break time today? Is today the day I get hit in the head, or a black eye? What happens if I can’t work.
You are doing the best you can, and it’s not good enough. So you work a bit harder, but you’ll notice how the previous five paragraphs are about meeting students needs in a way which doesn’t factor into actually teaching them. That’s representative of how these issues can swamp you, slowly take apart your ability to want to do the job. Because you’re doing the best you can, and it’s not good enough — and you’ve still got all of the other parts of your job to do.
Teaching
So back to the teaching. You’ve planned out your lessons based on the data and assessments and judgments you have available, fitting into the schools long-term plans. You’ve got a class of 25 students and you’ve got to manage their individual education targets in reading, writing and maths — ok, we can do that, not a problem. You’ve got most of the resources you need, but you’re a creative educator so you find them from somewhere and maybe sign up to a few paid resource sites to help you out so you’re not creating from whole cloth.
Except, these students aren’t where you thought they are. One of them definitely needs glasses, another really struggles with letter formation and you wonder what the deal is there. You’re probably going to have to work out the answer for yourself because every school has these issues and the MOE staff, who are brilliant, are run off their feet most of the time. Oh, and there’s one student with 30% attendance who, when they’re in class are amazing and you really feel there’s an awful lot of potential there being wasted. You have to do some fast, effective assessment to justify what you’re doing.
You work with groups of students at a time, so you can focus in on their needs, and things are great. You spend a little bit more time with one group because you just want to embed the learning and check their understanding, and suddenly you’ve run out of time in the lesson to see the groups you wanted to. Your choice is either, take that group and shorten the next session, but that’s a writing lesson and you really need them to get this new compound sentences thing if you want their next round of assessments to show the progress they need to. You have to negotiate with yourself over which is more valuable because something has to give here.
Oh shit, didn’t we tell you, you’ve got some external sports groups in today. Ok, you’ll have to ditch your maths lesson for today or try and teach it in the afternoon when the students energy and attention levels are nosediving. There’s an assembly though, so you’ll have to cut down the teaching time. Slice by slice the wide open space of 9–3 becomes fraught and pressured and you still have to muscle in every single session, because for some of these students they cannot afford to miss a day, or any more days. You find yourself editing plans, trying to make what you need to teach fit into the time you have to teach it, trying to ensure each student gets enough of your attention to meet their educational needs.
The bell rings at the end of the day, and you look at the books from today and get into marking them using the marking scheme. The classroom is quiet for the first time, and you look at what you were meant to do, and what you actually got done. Was it enough for you to say you did a good job today? If it wasn’t, you’ve just got to absorb that hit. There’s nowhere else for it to go, these are your students. You find that a group of your students who you thought had it, who you explained the activity to, who were meant to be working independently while you saw a group who had more need of teacher assistance — nah, they didn’t get it. You make a note on the planning to get that group around tomorrow, at some point. You make a cup of nasty instant coffee in a marae cup and stare into space for a bit.
Now combine this section with the previous one. Because those are two entirely different forms of pressure that teachers in NZ, and if you’re devoting time to one side of it, you’ve got to take time off from the other. Once again you’re negotiating on how much you’re willing to accept doing your best, but it just not being good enough. And that takes its toll on your passion, your enthusiasm and your mental ability to continue to want to keep doing the job.
I couldn’t do your job!
Every teacher hears this from parents. A secret, within the profession different grades of teacher say it to other grades. Secondary couldn’t do Primary, Primary look at secondary with horror at teenage angst, and all of us salute ECE Workers who honestly do the really hard yards and get paid awfully and treated incredibly poorly by a sector that it is apparently acceptable to privatise and subsidise? Anyway, I couldn’t do your job.
I can’t do that job anymore. I can’t negotiate with myself on how much I cannot support students in need socially and emotionally, or not be able to support students to their full academic potential. I can’t keep trying to work a couple of percent harder when there’s a gap between what the Ministry of Education provides and what they expect as results, and I absolutely cannot keep feeling like I’ve let these students down, even as I ground myself into the earth.
This year I’m a reliever. I go in, I teach, I leave. I handle things as they turn up. I establish relationships with repeat classes I teach. I go home, I play MarioKart with my son, I walk the dog. The pressure, the burden, the emotional weight, and guilt of the job isn’t there. I’m doing a full-time public-sector communications post-grad too, I am leaving teaching and I am certain I will miss being a teacher, but I will not miss doing the job as it is in Aotearoa New Zealand right now.
This is my story, I’m not speaking on behalf of every educator here, but I bet there’s more than a few who’ll read this and recognise something that they go through every day.
Conclusion
Teaching is bloody hard. I taught teaching students in the UK and AoNZ, as their professional mentor. For all of them I always asked a simple question:
“So, why do you want to be a teacher?”
The ones who answered about having a good teacher and wanting to help students, or being passionate about a subject, or wanting to do something that mattered in their working life — they all turned out to be pretty good teachers. Ones who talked about holidays, pay or — and I wish I was joking — their Mum telling them to get a job, they did less good.
The system is under immense strain, and that is being transferred onto overstretched management who literally cannot find staff to cover, especially with COVID wave after COVID wave. Shared classes, teachers doubling up on the lessons they’re teaching — retired teachers being drafted back in, some of them very far away from how things are done now. That pressure goes down, onto teachers and through them onto the education of your children.
One thing I will say. I have very rarely met a bad teacher. The overwhelming majority of educators across the entire sector are passionate, committed, and incredibly hard-working professionals who go above and beyond their contractual expectations to fulfill their duty as educators of students and ensure their safety and wellbeing. They spend their own money on resources, even food, for their students. They go above and beyond the call of duty, and they deserve recognition for that.
Nobody is in teaching for the money, but they’re not in it to burn themselves out trying to achieve the impossible. Most teachers perform miracles every single day, and it’s time the Government appreciated them for that and actually listened to their demands. Because in the end, it’ll lead to better education for students.
The working conditions of your teachers are the education conditions of your children. Back the striking workers today.
