{"id":253,"date":"2021-10-21T13:07:31","date_gmt":"2021-10-21T17:07:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/brandonblack\/?p=253"},"modified":"2021-10-23T11:03:24","modified_gmt":"2021-10-23T15:03:24","slug":"the-biggest-issue-facing-educators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/brandonblack\/2021\/10\/21\/the-biggest-issue-facing-educators\/","title":{"rendered":"The Biggest Issue Facing Educators"},"content":{"rendered":"

After coming home overwhelmed and exhausted yet again, one of countless times since the start of September, I thought to myself, \u201c<\/span>What are the biggest issues you\u2019re currently facing as an educator<\/span><\/i>?\u201d. I reflected on this question briefly as many ideas raced to mind. I had a lot to consider and, likely unsurprising to those who know me, even more to say. And yet, up until that time, I hadn\u2019t considered the issue much less put my ideas to paper. Not once. Not even a single word.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In that moment, I considered the emotional toll of the past 18 months but specifically that of the last two and a half. Traditionally, I\u2019m confident in my teaching abilities and practices in the classroom; this year, however, I\u2019m struggling. And I\u2019d be naive to think that I\u2019m the only educator who is reeling from a lack of resilience, patience, and, most of all, time.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It could be argued that the latter of the aforementioned struggles has been a perpetual problem within education even before the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic. Teachers have never had enough time in the day to teach their lessons, conference with students, lesson plan effectively, and mark student work in a timely manner. Consider too that these duties are solely our teaching re<\/span>sponsibilities and don\u2019t include our commitments as coaches, both planning and running practices, attending inter<\/span>school competitions, and making student mental health a priority within sport; our roles as department or team-teaching members, carving out time in an already packed schedule to meet, sharing best practices amongst colleagues, engaging in benchmark marking, or simply planning and aligning our courses; our duties as boarding school employees, sacrificing home time during a weeknight for an evening study, giving up our Saturdays for a weekend duty or programming, or trying to cohort students on a daily basis by an arbitrary measure; and the various miscellaneous responsibilities that eat away at our tim<\/span>e as educators, including school initiatives, advisory roles, whole faculty meetings, parent-teacher interviews, report comments, and, (one of the worst culprits of all…) email.<\/span><\/p>\n

Simply put, teachers in a normal year are charged with an impossible task: effectively meet the various demands of their job, go above and beyond with expectations that weren\u2019t originally foreseen (because, let\u2019s be honest, theirs always <\/span>more<\/span><\/i> as a teacher), and do so in a timeframe or within a school schedule that doesn\u2019t allow for the hours needed to complete the work, all the while preserving one\u2019s mental health to boot.<\/span><\/p>\n

We already know that teaching in a regular (whatever that means anymore) school year is unsustainable (<\/span>link<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>link<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>link<\/span><\/a>), and yet, we\u2019ve tried to go back to the way things were and in doing so have even further sacrificed our emotional wellbeing. Perhaps I\u2019m being overdramatic, but I\u2019ve always said to myself, even in my first year as a teacher, \u201cthe day I walk into work and no longer love what I do is the last day I\u2019ll step foot in a classroom.\u201d While I\u2019m not ready to walk away from teaching, if I\u2019m being honest, I\u2019m not certain that I love my job as it currently stands. Like a bad relationship, it\u2019s just not working for me. It\u2019s negatively impacting my emotional well-being. And I suspect I\u2019m not alone.<\/span><\/p>\n

On plane rides (what are those again?), we\u2019re always told to secure our own oxygen masks before assisting others. I want to preserve the resilience and learning of my students that has been lost over the past year and a half. But I can\u2019t do that, effectively, without preserving myself. If we as teachers continue at this pace, we will burn ourselves out and it will be the students most impacted as a result. The next pandemic, or more accurately epidemic, will be that of mental health; teachers are the first responders for the preservation of student emotional wellbeing. But who takes care of the first responders?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Teachers need to look after themselves first by rethinking their teaching practices and their baselines. They need to prioritize their work at work and their home life at home. Likewise, administrators need to support teachers in their aim to do so. They need to welcome opportunities for honest and reflective feedback and provide teachers tangible time within the academic day to meet their work demands.<\/span><\/p>\n

Office workers have realized that they don\u2019t need to return to the workplace because the preservation of their well-being and effectiveness as employees are not dichotomous. Likewise, educators can\u2019t simply return to the way things were without realizing the cost of doing so. We need to rethink our practices in preserving our mental health, we need administrative support in doing so, and we need to normalize advocating for one\u2019s wellbeing.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Follow on Twitter @bjeblack<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After coming home overwhelmed and exhausted yet again, one of countless times since the start of September, I thought to myself, \u201cWhat are the biggest issues you\u2019re currently facing as an educator?\u201d. I reflected on this question briefly as many ideas raced to mind. I had a lot to consider and, likely unsurprising to those … Continue reading “The Biggest Issue Facing Educators”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":305,"featured_media":254,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-face-2-face-sessions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/brandonblack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/brandonblack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/brandonblack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/brandonblack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/305"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/brandonblack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/brandonblack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":256,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/brandonblack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions\/256"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/brandonblack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/brandonblack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/brandonblack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/brandonblack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}