CBC News: Teacher Stress is Killing my Profession

Enjoyed this article about teacher stress and the changing world of teaching. It was posted in 2009 but just came up on my facebook feed recently. While I agree with some of the statements, I wonder about the long term impact of this systemic change to our profession.

he reality of every teacher trying to make even a modest go at this profession is a life of almost constant stress, overwork and, at times, emotional exhaustion.

Anyone who enters the teaching profession thinking otherwise is in for a rude awakening. 

So why am I griping? I chose this profession and I enjoy what I do. 

Well, it is because a storm of new and increasingly unrealistic demands, coupled with a noticeable decline in support from many principals and parents, is contributing to a growing incidence of illness among teachers, including mental illness due to work-related stress. 

I should note that teaching has not broken me. But it has broken the sanity and soul of some very motivated teachers I know. 

Burn-out profession? A Saskatchewan study says almost 60 per cent of teachers face job stress. (Associated Press file photo)

"I think that the whole idea of teaching has changed in the last 15 to 20 years," says Emily Noble, past-president of the Canadian Teachers' Federation. 

"People are dealing with more high-need students, with more multicultural issues and with no-fail policies.

"Teachers want to make a difference, but the supports are just not there."

The best are falling

Add to this the largely undocumented group of what I call the walking wounded, those teachers whose energy levels have been sapped so much by all the new administrative demands that they have little left over to give directly to their students.

I have occasionally heard it said that these increasing demands and stresses are a positive development because they will weed out those whose commitment to the profession may be problematic.

But in my experience, it has been the most highly motivated and committed teachers who undergo the most stress and who break down simply because they truly care for their students and, against the odds, try to deliver.

Mediocre teachers, it seems, have less of a problem in detaching their personal well-being from that of their students. And that is not just my view.

"Burnout is more common in the young, highly motivated, energetic, hard-working teacher," says Prof. Martin. "The people who burn out are the people who pour everything into it without balance." 

Read the entire article here 

When something is bugging me....

Good advice for kids—and their grown-ups! 
http://bit.ly/17is8m4

The Moment I Knew... Less Stress, More Living

This is an excellent article from a teacher about stress, her breaking point, how it happened, and how she handled it... very well written and easy to connect to as a teacher.

Worklife balance and stress management are such important parts of being a teacher and I think too often educators do not have the tools, time or ability to "de stress" in healthy ways to maintain that emotional health and balance that is key.

The Moment I knew.... By Heather Hollis

My student's father is listing my faults like he's ticking off a grocery list. 

"He knows you don't like him. You don't call him 'my angel' like his teacher did last year."
 
"You humiliate him in front of the class."
 
"You blame him for everything."
 
No mention is made of the fact that this child has been noted for anger and social issues since he started school.

No mention is made of the fact that if another child looks at him sideways, he hauls off and punches them. And then screams and cries that he has been wrongly accused.
 
No mention is made of the fact that this child has disrupted the entire class over and over again to the detriment of all the other children.
 
I try to explain that I am very concerned about this child's success and happiness but it falls on deaf ears. I'm sweating and my heart is beating a mile a minute. My fight or flight impulse is on full throttle and I start to wonder if I'm having a panic attack.
 
Dad is on a roll and I'm about to be flattened.
 
Finally, he concludes his list of my offenses by saying quite matter-of-factly, "I'm afraid he's going to hurt himself or worse and, I don't like to say it, but I think it would be because of you."
 
And that's when it happened.
 
I could feel the proverbial straw breaking the camel's back. Except instead of the camel's back, it was a little something inside my head.
 
I was suddenly cold but calm.
 
I stood up and said, "I have to go now" and walked out of the room.
As I walked away, I started to cry.
 
I cried for 10 hours straight.
 
The next morning I got up and went back to work.

But it was different. I was different.
 
I took the next week off -- stress leave they called it. But it was more than that.
Something inside me died that day.
 
Logically, I knew I wasn't to blame, but emotionally? That was a different story.
My class that year was overloaded with children who had a wide variety of special needs. With resources stretched thin, it was impossible to give each one the attention they needed and deserved.
 
I dealt with unhappy, frustrated parents who (rightly) complained and demanded better services. Worse than that, I had students who often sat idle because they could not do the work without one-on-one support.
 
But it was like getting blood from stone. There was no money in the budget for extra help and the ratio of 29 students to one teacher was a recipe for disaster.
 
This is not to say it was a terrible year; quite the contrary. In fact, I loved my students and they, for the most part, loved me. We laughed and learned and had some wonderful times.
 
But there was a hole in my heart that just kept widening. I darkly joked to my fellow teachers that it didn't matter if anyone got upset with me anymore because I was "dead inside."
 
When I found myself sobbing in the bathtub the night before the last day of school, I realized it was time.
 
I had survived the battle but lost the war. My love for teaching was gone.

I spent the following year on an unpaid leave of absence. Luckily for me, I had a supportive spouse and a healthy line of credit. It was a year well spent regaining my mental and physical health.
 
Sleeping came first. I slept like the dead for months.
 
Then I started exercising -- long walks, yoga and fitness classes, jogging. Meditation and heart-felt chats with good friends and family. I focused on eating healthy. I eased up on the daily wine habit that had become a quick and easy way of blotting out the feelings of anger and frustration.
 
I read voraciously and watched television in the middle of the day.
 
Finally, I started writing again. Honestly and from the heart about issues related to teaching and women and mothering.

It didn't happen all at once but eventually I saw the changes. My heart began to open again and the bitterness started to seep away.

I stopped whispering horrible lies to myself, like, "You were a bad teacher. Those children shouldn't have had to endure a year like you gave them." And I started to listen to my true voice that said, "They knew you loved them. And look at how far they came!  

Insult yourself and you insult them."

I know now that I can't single-handedly change the education system. I can, however, change the way one teacher handles it.

Bring it on. I'm ready.

SOURCE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/heather-hollis/the-moment-i-knew_27_b_3427778.html

Taming Worry Dragons

Source: heretohelp.bc.ca via Amanda on Pinterest

I love this program "Taming the Worry Dragons"

A teacher-friend told me about this program that helps children deal with anxiety and stress and worries.

New Teachers Leaving the Profession

I have heard this statistic before... how a high number of new teachers leave the profession in the five years for various reasons. For that reason, I suppose, it is good that I am in my seventh year, albeit still not continuing full-time due to lack of jobs and the structure in which jobs are posted in my district (or not posted in many cases) but that is another rant.

Patricia Melnyk writes in the Montreal Gazette:

As a non-permanent or contract teacher, I have also had my share of positions where working conditions were far from ideal. For example, I have taught classes classified as “regular,” which are supposed to include mainly students whose behaviour falls within the normal range. In fact, sometimes these classes have included not only students who are coded (students with diagnosed conditions such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), autism and academic or behavioural problems), but also a good number of students with undiagnosed disorders. Under these trying conditions, teaching in the normal sense of the word becomes almost impossible, with constant noise, disruption and chaos. Moreover, classes such as these are also relatively large. These vexing conditions can and often do lead to a teacher’s deep sense of frustration, hopelessness and even burnout.

Burnout is something I recently talked about with student teachers I presented to at Vancouver Island University. It is so important to find work-life balance and avoid burnout, but I digress.

I'd be lying if I said I hadn't considered a different profession, I love teaching, it is my passion, which is why I am still doing it... but after the first three years of not obtaining a contract, feeling exhausted and abused at the end of the day as "a sub" I really debated if this was something I could maintain doing.... luckily in year four I had a contract a "class of my own" at least temporarily and started to realize I could never leave... still, I can see why some consider leaving and understand how many make that decision. Teaching is tough!

I read with great interest several articles recently written about the percentage of teachers who leave their profession in the early years.

According to McGill University statistics, nearly 50 per cent of all new teachers in North America leave the profession within their first five years of teaching. As a teacher in my 39th year in a public high school, I understand the many reasons they do so.

The article (which I encourage you to read, it is well written and addresses many things teachers will nod their head in agreement to) focuses on three reasons many teachers leave the profession:

1. False Accusations
2. Parents
3. Special Needs students (which I read as lack of support for special needs)

 “The education field is in crisis,” Jon G. Bradley, associate professor of education at McGill University has stated. It is easy to understand why this is so and why teachers are abandoning the merry-go-round of disgruntled parents, the staggering number of special-needs students and the false accusation syndrome for careers in which impotency, impossible demands and abuse do not thrive.

So what do we do about this problem? Nothing? Seems the problem is only being made worse...

Universities are still pumping out new teachers, with no growth of jobs, there is a surplus of teachers in many areas of Canada and the retention of quality teachers seems to be a non-issue. Many teachers leave the profession, but there are ten more waiting to take their place. The turn-over is like that of some jobs I held in my university days, new cook every other week, customers don't know the different, but guess what? Students do...

Montreal Gazette writes:

“Any other profession that had that kind of turnover would look at working conditions, would look at salaries and other things surrounding the teaching environment,” said Joel Westheimer, university research chair and professor at the University of Ottawa’s faculty of education. “Instead, in education, we bring up talk about testing teachers and linking their pay to the students’ performance. I mean, can you imagine Microsoft suffering a crisis because there were not enough programmers going into the profession and leaving after the first five years? Would (the company’s) response be to increase salaries, recruit better people, change working conditions so that they could work in different places, have free soda and free lunches? Or would it test them?”

Sadly, this isn't just new teachers feeling the pressure. Debra Berry writes:

I’d like to point out that it is not just the new, young teachers who are quitting. I left at 55, with 32 years of teaching high school, the last six with horrific, inhumane workloads. I taught 14 groups of students, 400 teenagers, twice a week, in what felt like a factory assembly line. As a teacher who ran multiple student activities and sports teams over the years, I was exhausted. The success of my students sat squarely on my shoulders with little or no support from a board obsessed with the budget over students’ needs, and an administration with so much paperwork they never came out of their offices.

Many of my colleagues are leaving for the same reasons, most before full pension. I am so glad I got out, but my daughter, after three years of teaching, is exhausted by her workload of four different elementary school levels, many special-needs children not properly supported and hours of unpaid and unrecognized preparation time.

I think education needs to be a priority for provincial governments. There needs to be adequate funding and support in the classrooms to help retain teachers and ensure students are getting the education they deserve.

Other related articles:
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/lesson+fighting+back/7895140/story.html

http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/Janet+Bagnall+need+study+many+teachers+leaving+field/7907873/story.html

http://www.montrealgazette.com/opinion/Opinion+Teachers+jobs+becoming+increasingly+stressful/7921769/story.html

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Accusations+impossible+demands+problem+parents+drive+away/7940986/story.html

BCTF Workshops for TTOCs

There are a number of workshops available for Teachers-Teaching-on-Call that can be booked for free. You can talk to your local TTOC rep or local president to secure a location and date to book these workshops. Then you can email or call the BCTF to book a facilitator who will come in with the materials to run the workshop for your TTOCs.

This is available to all BC teachers and is usually booked for a local or neighbouring locals can team up to book.

Currently to book the workshop you email nbove@bctf.ca or kshields@bctf.ca

Teachers Teaching on Call (TTOCs) Workshops

1. Work-Life Balance: This workshop offers strategies for maintaining work-life balance in a particularly stressful role.

2. Dealing with Stress: Teachers Teaching on Call often face uncertainty in the workplace, this workshops explores how to develop positive strategies to effectively respond to stress.

4. Raising health and safety awareness: Teachers Teaching on Call are often unaware of of the workplace risks. This workshop deals with awareness and procedures for workplace safety.

5. Reality 101: Life teaching on call. This workshop is designed to support new teachers teaching on call. It provides current teaching practices and practical resources, and to enhance confidence in new TTOCs.

6. Employment Insurance Seminar (EI): This presentation helps TTOCs understand the steps to follow in applying for and obtaining EI benefits. This presentation is also on-line on the BCTF website.

7. Classroom Management for TTOCs: Teachers teaching on call encounter a variety of classrooms and this workshop deals with the unique issues of classroom management faced by TTOCs. It outlines reasons for student non-compliance, the difference between punishment and discipline, and uses discussion and scenarios to outline strategies for dealing with these situations.

9. Engaging and Supporting Teachers teaching on Call: The New Reality in a Bill 22 World: TTOCs are often more vulnerable than members who are attached to a regular staff with access to frequent support. This workshop will cover ways locals and individuals can create support structures and build solidarity amongst TTOCs.

There are also a number of other workshops available to all teachers, including TTOCs. Here is where to read up on them all.

1. Go to the BCTF portal

2. Click "Teachers"

3. Click "Professional Development"

4. Click "Workshops and Conferences"

This will open a PDF of all workshops offered by the BCTF.

This week I spent three days at the BCTF Facilitators' Institute where new and experienced facilitators met to train and prepare. There are a number of people available to facilitate these workshops. Contact the BCTF to book!