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RIDING THE WAVE
According to professor Ralf Schwarzer and scholar Suhair Hallum (2008), burnout is “a chronic state of exhaustion due to long-term interpersonal stress within human service professions. It pertains to feelings experienced by people whose jobs require repeated exposure to emotionally charged social situations” (p. 155). Indeed, most difficulties that teachers encounter in the profession are emotionally charged. Schwarzer and Hallum (2008) quote the foundational work of Michael P. Leiter and Christina Maslach (1998) and argue that there are three symptoms of burnout: (1) emotional exhaustion, (2) depersonalization, and (3) reduced personal accomplishment. 1. Emotional exhaustion: When teachers say, “I am at the end of my rope,” they mean they have emotional exhaustion. It is a juncture of one’s career characterized by the sapping of one’s emotional energy. Frequent symptoms of emotional exhaustion can include lethargy, fatigue, and even debilitation (Schwarzer & Hallum, 2008). This stress component is more than the physical exhaustion that results from being on one’s feet for seven hours, engaging large numbers of students for whom the teacher has full responsibility. Instead, this manifestation of teacher burnout usually emerges after long exposure to stressful situations—situations that are often beyond the classroom teacher’s control. 2. Depersonalization: When teachers pivot from a positive and enthusiastic professional disposition to a decidedly more cynical and negative one, they generally do so because the job itself has become depersonalized. Depersonalization occurs when a teacher, for whatever reason, no longer feels personally connected to the outcomes of the classroom in which he or she teaches. Teachers who speak of being “over it” or who claim to no longer feel invested in their teaching environment embody this component of burnout, which is more than a simple loss of idealism. Once a teacher depersonalizes his or her job, he or she will have difficulty reclaiming feelings of self-efficacy and success without undergoing intense reflection and professional assessment. This is why so many teachers either stop being personally invested in class outcomes or leave the profession altogether.
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much emphasis on testing, and too much teaching to the test—are driving teachers from the classroom. On top of that are teachers’ clear feelings of hopelessness, or futility, when it comes to the metrics by which many in and outside the profession define educational success, as only 43 percent of surveyed teachers believed student achievement would improve between 2011 and 2016 (MetLife, 2012). In the 21st century, capable teachers who may have entered their careers with confidence and positivity may end up feeling, frankly, burned out.
