The OTher fAce Of BUrnOUT

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 teach- er 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 on- line 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. 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.”

Over her three years of experience, Chern learned that being a teacher is not how she thought it would be like in elementary school. She pulled up a tweet that said, “Teaching: the only job

you have to work before you get to work, so you have work to do at work. Then, because there was no time at work to do work, you have to do work after work to catch up on the work you didn’t get a chance to do at work.”

“Now I feel like I understand when my teachers in high school would be like, ‘You guys have no idea how much work or how long it takes to grade things and to get things back as fast as students wanted,’” Chern said.

While teachers are helping to foster an educational environment with working computers and engaged students, they are also creating an environment where students feel comfortable enough to share their problems with their teachers.

“In an ideal environment, the teacher teaches, right? That’s technically what the job is, but teachers do so much more,” Sato said. “Within a classroom, they’re adult role models. They care about the students. If a student is having some sort of emotional struggle, we deal with that.”

When there are moments during class that he can sense students are not paying attention, it makes Sato feel like they are not respecting him as a teacher. He understands that all students have off days, but he wants students to know that teachers are also human and it does affect them.

“I think every teacher has had days where they were just like, ‘I am so ready for the end of the day,’” Sato said. “‘I want this class to be over. I want the school day to be over. I just want to go home and sit on the couch and watch TV. Do something else. I just don’t want to be here.’”

Bailey feels like “the guy that spins the dishes on the stick, but new dishes keep being added.” She finds it hard to want to turn on the computer and do work when she gets home when all she wants to do is watch Netflix. Even though this year has been especially hard, when she experiences the “aha moment” with her students, it reminds her of why she started and is still teaching.

“It’s the moment where the one student is struggling with something and all of a sudden they go, ‘Oh my gosh, I just got it right,’” Bailey said. “We call that the ‘aha moment,’ the lightbulb moment. It’s that one moment where it clicks. It means I’ve done my job and that student has done the critical thinking for them to do their job because it is their job to be here at school and sometimes that job is hard for both of us.”