Teachers struggle with fatigue from school year ARTICLE BY SHAYNA TRAN • PHOTO ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN BY CHLOE LUU When many teachers dreamt of their future, they imagined the joy and fulfillment of teaching a subject they are passionate about. They got excited thinking about the students being able to fully understand and appreciate their exciting subject, but they did not realize the toll that it would take on them. “You’re thinking to yourself, man, I failed that test,” science teacher Reo Sato said. “But if several students fail a test, as a teacher, I feel like I failed those students. But I feel like sometimes teachers, including myself, have too much of an attachment and get too invested to a point where we’re kind of being stretched all over the place.” Teacher burnout is a psychological condition that leads to exhaustion, depersonalization and decreased teache r achievement and self-worth. It is typically a temporary condition in which an educator has exhausted the personal and professional resources necessary to do their job. Demoralization occurs when an educator believes they are unable to perform the work in ways that uphold the high standards of the profession. Sato, AP Chemistry and chemistry teacher, describes it as becoming too attached to the idea that they are doing something wrong. Science teacher Vivien Chern’s first year of teaching was during the transition from in person to online learning in 2020. “Being a new teacher, it’s really difficult to separate work from home, even when I go home during distance teaching,” Chern said. “It was even harder to separate that sometimes after school after everyone logs off Zoom. I would still be sitting at my computer until the evening past dinner.” UPA transitioned back to in-person learning for the 2021-2022 school year. Science teacher Elisheva Bailey was excited to come back to school and see her students, but she was worried about how the students would behave and how they would adapt to in-person learning. 13 | FEATURES
Chern agrees and feels the ninth graders are still in middle school because they lost that year and a half of social interaction. “I think there is still some learning loss, and I think students are still struggling to try and catch up with that,” Bailey said. “I was really worried when we first started school in August that everybody was just going to be socially inept.” Though teachers want everyone to do well in their classes, they find it hard to keep track of everyone. Bailey also finds it difficult to remember all of the small details that are important. Recently, she woke up at 2 a.m. and remembered she needed to prepare for a lab she had in the afternoon. “It’s important that they know I have 135 students, and I can’t be chasing everybody down all the time to turn in assignments because it’s hard,” Bailey said. “I have high expectations of them because they’re here at the school for a reason. I want them to do well, but they also have to meet me halfway.”
