Spring wellness: A perfect cup of coffee is a lot like education

A perfect cup of coffee is a lot like education

Words by Sam Healy.

OK, stay with me on this. We know exactly how we like our coffee. We know how to order it, how it should look and how we like it to taste. But when that coffee doesn’t meet our expectations, very few of us could step behind that roaring coffee machine and produce the perfect cup of coffee for ourselves – let alone anyone else’s.

Making the perfect cup of coffee requires specific abilities and commitment. Making every cup of coffee perfect for every customer requires even more.

When it comes to schools and our children, our expectations are understandably much higher. We know what we want in classrooms. We know how to explain it. To some degree, we know how it should look and sound. We’re experts in our version of a perfect day at school. However, very few of us can walk into the classroom and make that vision come to life.

Right now, our community risks losing many of the people who do have the skills to do this. According to research from Monash University, sixty percent of our educators plan on leaving the profession for reasons relating to workload pressure and wellbeing issues.

As a community, we can help each other, simply by being curious and understanding each other’s perspectives. As a start, we spoke to Josh who shared his perspective as an educator at Willunga Waldorf School, taking us behind the ‘coffee machine’ of teaching. What can workload pressure and wellbeing issues look like for teachers? For Josh, the ‘admin workload’ over the course of the pandemic increased by around a third, adding to an already standard fifty-hour week. Of course teachers aren’t alone in experiencing additional strain throughout the pandemic. What’s difficult to factor into our understanding, however, is the added ‘emotional workload’ of leading a class of students. Or as Josh eloquently puts it, the love, care and attention requirements of being a teacher.

During semester one this year, Josh felt as if he was living in a ‘pressure cooker’, knowing that something new would be added every day. He had to find a way to stay afloat, to furiously kick underwater while appearing steady on the surface for the children and their families. Our teachers had to inject more love and care into every small aspect, every interaction of their day. And their days are filled with interactions. It’s an unquantifiable workload.

Josh found himself craving a lot more alone time away from school. This makes sense – interactions require energy and we don’t have an endless supply. He also recognised how increasingly blurred the line between teaching and other roles, like counseling and even parenting, was becoming. So, he kept working tirelessly to provide his kids and families with the love, care and attention that they deserved.

‘I’m invested in this,’ he says. ‘I can’t deny that it impacts me, but I wouldn’t want to do any other job.’

How can we help? As humans, we all have a deep psychological need to be seen, heard, valued and cared for. The behavioural scientist BJ Fogg says that the only way to create sustainable change is through tiny steps. As a community, if we focus on taking tiny steps then we can support each other’s wellbeing.

We can support our teachers with a smile at drop off, a thank you at the end of the week, letting them know when learning is being talked about at home. Instead of judging and reacting, we can ask open and honest questions driven by curiosity. Our teachers and our children deserve these tiny gestures. A core value at Willunga Waldorf School is: ‘A healthy social life is found only when, in the mirror of each soul, the whole community finds its reflection, and when, in the whole community, the virtue of each one is living.’

After reading this, we still might not be able to make that perfect cup of educational coffee. Perhaps though, we’ve taken a tiny step towards being that mirror, that smile, that thank you, for all of those working incredibly hard in our community.

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