I knew teaching was hard, but nothing could have prepared me for the special type of fatigue I’d face as a teacher. After a long day of teaching, I feel particularly drained in a way I’ve never felt. Not when I was a student athlete, nor when I was overloaded on credits in college and was pulling all-nighters, nor during my internships or when I was working up to five different jobs in NYC to piece together a salary. I mean never.
I don’t even know how to describe this feeling. No matter how many hours I sleep, handling the kids all day wipes me out, especially when I teach certain classes with some particularly rowdy students. Maybe my personality is simply not well suited for public school teaching, but I think this is honestly a universal feeling among all teachers at some point. Here are some ways fatigue from teaching has changed my thoughts and habits.
1. I eat better.
It’s simply necessary. If I don’t pay close attention to my nutrition, I inevitably get sick over and over again, either from the stress of managing a classroom of energetic students all day or from the exposure to germs from yelling over the energetic students all day, every day. Luckily my school provides pretty nutritious meals for lunch. It’s also easier to get nutritious meals at an affordable price in Seoul than in NYC, but unhealthy options are just as readily available, so I still think my job has influenced my improved food choices more than simple convenience. It would definitely help to sleep more as well, but I’ve found that sleep is a harder factor to control than nutrition while I’ve been in Seoul.
2. I value silence more.
I used to be the type of person who filled my day with social activity and could be reenergized from a conversation with a friend, but now I need to mindfully schedule times to enjoy silence. Working in a public school all day means I only ever have maybe a few minutes of silence at a time, and even after school hours when I am working in my office, I can hear the children shouting outside my door as they play with their friends or attend their afterschool classes, many of which also take place in the public school building. Sometimes I notice the silence when I’m alone in my room at home and feel a strange overwhelming sense of appreciation for it. That’s where we’re at now.
3. Coffee is back.
I was an avid coffee drinker during college but after graduating I had cut back a bit. Now that I’ve started teaching, I probably consume about as much caffeine as I did during peak finals season back in college. My morning coffee ritual has become necessary to survival. It allows me to get to work and fall into a familiar routine immediately without thinking too much about what to do next, because once my classes start, my brain is switched on for at least five hours straight. I can get through a day without my morning coffee, but whenever that happens, I feel slightly off or low energy. I basically give presentations, field questions, facilitate projects and activities, think on my feet, watch the clock, make hundreds of different decisions, and manage a crowd of humans with underdeveloped brains for hours at a time every day, work that has definitely increased my caffeine dependency.
4. I crash more often.
I said earlier that getting more sleep would help me and this is absolutely true, because there are times when I simply crash. I fall asleep anywhere (usually at my office desk or somewhere at home) and don’t even know when it happened. This is another quirk of the job that I haven’t experienced before, but I have heard of other teachers suddenly needing ten hours of sleep a day in their first few years even if that wasn’t their regular schedule before. I totally understand this now. Something about this job causes my brain to require more sleep than before. It’s really physical exhaustion, but more mental and emotional exhaustion, so sleep is really important. The crashing problem has gotten better over time, especially if I maintain my nutrition, good sleeping habits, and emotional regulation skills, but my point is that I have never needed to pay so much attention to these things to function daily.
5. I think several days, weeks, or even months ahead
Curriculum planning is just like that. I do follow the YBM curriculum, but it is a bit too short to fill the whole school year, so I work carefully with several different English co-teachers to plan out the lessons for the year months in advance. The plan is constantly changing to adapt to different things that come up along the way, and planning for my winter and summer English camps is an entirely separate and even more complicated matter. Often I rarely finish a day on Friday without thinking about exactly what I have to accomplish first thing on Monday in order for a Wednesday next month to run smoothly, or something like that.
Teachers really get all types of fatigue.
Decision fatigue, performance fatigue, social fatigue, compassion fatigue, burnout, everything. I had a fellow teacher once tell me she feels like a clown. Every day is a performance, and just like in show business, the audience doesn’t care if you’re tired. You cannot have a low productivity day. The kids show up to class every day, government mandated.
Compassion fatigue is one I learned about recently. It’s commonly experienced among caregivers, healthcare workers, therapists, and the like. Teachers deal with a lot of emotional labor every day: responding to student emotions and problems, reading emotions, listening intently, explaining and understanding, dealing with sudden crises. Capacity for empathy can literally run out. I’ve experienced this more as feeling emotionally numb after teaching for a while, especially if a lot happened that day. Kids fight in class (sometimes physically hitting each other), kids come to me crying, everyone needs me to explain something, everyone’s question needs individual attention, surprises come up like a mandatory training or meeting. Specifically as an EFL teacher, sometimes kids will rant to me about something while speaking entirely in Korean and I have to really lock in to catch onto what they’re saying, or sometimes I have to take over a class on my own with no co-teacher to help with translating complex instructions into Korean. That’s just the job I signed up for, but the emotional side effects have taken me by surprise at times.
Although, when the kids are happy and excited, it does boost my mood a lot. The students’ moods and attitudes have a huge impact on my own, so good days are good, but children are so fickle, and that is also part of the emotional fatigue.
Social pressures here do not help.
I find it very hard to take a day off, even sick days, because of the social pressure not to, and because of the sense of responsibility to the students, and because the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education Coordinator strongly advised us to never take days off during the school year and to consider the burden on other teachers when taking sick days. It seems to be a very complicated process to get substitute teachers here, so if someone is sick, other teachers often pick up the slack on top of their regular load.
Another stress point I was not prepared for was the amount of pressure teachers feel from parents, in a way that I think is different from public schools in the U.S. Parents have a huge influence over schools and teachers, and even though I personally do not interact with parents, I still can feel their influence creeping into school policies and politics. This limits the way we can manage classrooms, and even classroom management strategies that seem super light and acceptable to me as an American feel more restricted.
Now it seems like I have only complaints, but most of the time it’s not too bad, and as the native speaking English teacher on staff I have it way easier than my co-workers in many respects. I do feel that teaching is every bit as rewarding as they say. I’m just also saying that the teaching fatigue is on a different plane in a way I really didn’t expect. It’s like my life has reorganized more around recovery to keep me going just one more day. I realize that may sound similar to any 9-5 job, but I do think this is truly a different type of tired that is unique to teaching, hence the term “teacher tired.” Wish me luck this week.
Love,
B.
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