How to stop teaching from taking over your entire life
Building every lesson plan from scratch while spending weekends grading leaves no time for a life outside the classroom. This constant exhaustion and stress make it nearly impossible to disconnect, ultimately leading to severe burnout.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Arriving at work early to complete tasks while the building is empty
- 2Leaving school laptops at work and not signing into work accounts on personal devices
- 3Simplifying assignments and being selective about what gets graded
- 4Using pre-made free online resources or lesson plan templates instead of designing everything from scratch
- 5Planning to send personal documents and proven materials to a third party so the generated plans resemble the teacher's original content
- 6Writing lessons last minute or on the fly
- 7Taking a long time to respond to emails
- 8Focusing only on day-to-day survival rather than long-term planning
- 9Accepting being called 'the mean teacher' to enforce strict structure and discipline
- 10Keeping classroom centers simple or using a basic library center instead of building custom activities
- 11Borrowing curriculum ideas and lesson plans from veteran teachers and teammates
- 12Limiting weekend work hours and ignoring non-essential suggestions from specialists
- 13asking the district to provide a curriculum or help build one to change as needed
In their words
Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Still, I'm finding it incredibly difficult to have a life outside of teaching, and very hard not to let it take over my life.”source ↗
“I am having to build everything from scratch!”source ↗
“my weekends are spent bed rotting and grading. I am so exhausted, yet I've had trouble sleeping because of the stress and anxiety.”source ↗
“Last year, I was constantly writing up lessons last minute, or just putting together lessons on the fly.”source ↗
“It would be so hard for me to even think a week into the future because I felt like something new would happen every day and I would just be dead after work, not wanting to do anything.”source ↗
“building a curriculum as a 1st year teacher sounds tough.”source ↗
“As a first year teacher going through it... thank you”source ↗
“As the title says, I’m six weeks into my first teaching job in first grade and I’m struggling. My kids behaviors are bad, they don’t listen to me, and they talk all the time. I have a hard time keeping up with all of the curriculum, trying to also somehow have centers made, the specialists are hard on me after they’ve been in my room, I work on materials on my weekends because I only have one free conference a week, and I go home crying everyday feeling like it’s never going to get better.”source ↗
“I’m trying my best, but it just doesn’t feel like it. I feel like I’m going to be miserable and under a watchful eye from others I work with forever.”source ↗
“recientemente emprendí con mi pareja y me está tomando el tiempo que usaba en planear mis clases, entonces pagar para hacer planeaciones es algo que he considerado, aunque no sé qué tan ético sea.”source ↗
Where this came up
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