Balancing Home and Work As a Teacher

I frequently get asked how I balance my home and work life as a teacher. The truth is, for many years I didn’t. When you are a new teacher, it can be overwhelming at first because the job is so demanding. To be honest, as you get a few years under your belt, it doesn’t get any easier. However, if you set your boundaries, it can be rewarding.

I have been a certified teacher for twelve years now, and I am going on my eighth year as a full-time teacher. In my first four years of teaching, I was a full-time substitute, so, while still a teacher, I didn’t have the extra responsibilities that I have today. I enjoyed the freedom of a certified substitute. I could work whenever and whatever I wanted, and choose jobs that didn’t have as much responsibility if I wanted to. Once I became a teacher under contract, I was dumped with immense responsibilities that I wasn’t prepared for, especially with what was going on in my life at the time.

In January of 2014, my mom went into the hospital with Diabetic Ketoacidosis which is a severe condition that occurs when your body cannot produce enough insulin. The condition caused my mother to have multiple strokes over a period of time and she eventually also lost part of her foot due to infection. I quit my job with the school I was working at to move back to my hometown to live with my mom and grandma. After nearly two months in the hospital, my mother’s insurance would not cover the cost of her recovery, and she was forced to recover at home. During that time, I learned how to give medications, perform physical therapy, clean wounds, and change her at-home IV. I also learned to do the things that my mom did to manage my grandma’s household and care.

It was overwhelming, to say the least. I took a job as an English teacher at one of the local schools to help pay for bills. It was a small school, so it did not provide things that larger schools provide such as mentorship or a curriculum. I was handed a classroom and was told to figure it out. My job also came with “hidden duties” that kept me away from my mom and grandma for long hours that were not discussed when I was hired. For example, I was to be the cheerleading coach and the One-Act Play director. That first year was tough for me because I felt like I was working 24 hours a day. I almost quit teaching after that first year.

A gift I made for my first class of graduating seniors.

According to Forbes, one in three pre-pandemic teachers left the profession within the first five years of teaching for the same frustrations I felt during my first few years of teaching:  lack of support, inability to have a life outside of school, and low wages. Since the pandemic, over 300,000 teachers have left the profession according to the Wall Street Journal, and 44% of schools across the United States have reported a vast number of vacancies. My personal experience has been much the same. After the initial quarantine ended, many teachers at my school (including myself) began to contract COVID-19, which caused mixed reactions such as teachers leaving and not coming back to work and parents quarantining their children. The results left my school understaffed for the rest of the school year. Every teacher I knew told me their school was having the same problem. A friend of mine told me that her school had 44 vacancies by the end of the school year and was unable to fill the positions for this coming school year.

How does this affect me? I made a promise to myself after my divorce to make more time for myself. Truth be told, I worked extra hours at my job pre-pandemic because I wasn’t happy and I was avoiding my home life. Yes, the first few years as a teacher are hard but I was always told to stick it out because it does get better, especially after a few years of making your curriculum. Although the post-pandemic school year was one of the most stressful years I’ve had teaching, it was also the easiest and most successful year I’ve had teaching.

Things I did to bring balance to my life:

• For starters, I told myself that it was okay to say “no.” I was a victim of not saying “no” during my first few years of teaching because I was afraid that I would lose my job. I didn’t value myself and what I brought to the table, so I volunteered myself for everything with the idea that it would make me a more valuable employee, but in reality, I burnt myself out. I was so exhausted, that I would just lay in bed and stare at the ceiling when I got home from work.
• I told myself that I would bring minimal work home. If I couldn’t do it during the school day or within an hour after school, it could wait until the next day. A big mistake that teachers make is that they give up their family time and weekends to grade papers and do lesson planning. I would oftentimes bring boxes of work home and just stare at them. Staring at that work usually ruined my off-time.
• Also, I started therapy. Post-divorce and post-pandemic, therapy has been a game changer, and there is nothing wrong with having to seek therapy. Mental health should always be the number one priority. In the process, it has taught me to let the little things that bother me go. Right before school started last year, I started having panic attacks to the point that I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house. Therapy was a life-saver.
• I made work friends. Before my divorce, I had work friends, but it is hard to have friends when you are married to a narcissist. This year, I resolved to strengthen bonds with coworkers and participate in a team mentality. Some of those friendships even translated to outside-of-work relationships. Once a week, my coworker friends and I would go out to dinner, and once a month we would have a self-care day together.
• I started doing more out-of-work projects and am now here, writing this blog and recording a weekly podcast with Christen and Cindy. In a future blog, I will discuss the projects that I have been working on lately.
• I take time out for date nights. When I met Jason, neither of us got out of the house to do anything. We resolved early on in our relationship that we would have regular date nights and try something new every time we went out such as bowling, Shakespeare in the Park, circus performances, festivals, and spontaneous trips to the farmer’s market. Recently we went on a vacation to New Orleans and Gulf Shores, Alabama.

There is no perfect conclusion to balancing home and work. Before you can begin the process, you have to understand your priorities. Do you even want a life outside of work? For a long time, I didn’t, but I wasn’t living. I was just going from paycheck to paycheck, thinking that one day I would be able to live the life I wanted. Then, I just took that step and started living for myself and it was the greatest thing I ever did.

I want to hear from our readers. What are some things you do to balance home and work? Do you have any tips and tricks? Please, let me know in the comments.

Keeping Your Priorities Straight

In yesterday’s podcast, Amber, Christen, and I discussed the challenges of balancing work and home life. It’s been an age-old problem, and not just for women. In the past, I’ve been a helpless bystander as I watched my husband work himself to death at a very demanding job that left him exhausted at the end of the day with no energy or time for his family. It was brutal, and it was damaging, both physically and mentally. I am no different. There are times when my job demands that I finish certain projects on a deadline, and I find myself working alone in the wee hours of the morning, trying to get it all done. At the time, it felt like it was my biggest priority, but was it?

Today is the 6th anniversary of the day I learned that I had breast cancer, which started an onslaught of doctors appointments, surgeries, radiation treatments, and medications that had unpleasant side effects. Around that same time, I also found out I was a Type 2 diabetic (more medicine, more doctors, more yuk). I also wound up with injuries to both my knees, requiring two surgeries, countless sessions of physical therapy, and chronic pain.

At a recent therapy session, I was chatting with my counselor about how busy I was and how I didn’t have time for this or that task that was weighing on me. I was bemoaning the fact that I have so many doctor's appointments all the time, often two or three in the same week, and how it felt like an imposition on my time. Time I should be using to further my business or clean my house. Time to do that bookkeeping that’s overdue. Time to tend to my own self-care by crafting or reading or watching a movie. How was I supposed to get all these things done if I had to spend two or three of my work days every week at doctor’s appointments? I felt inconvenienced and I resented it, but she helped me see it in a different light.

I can’t remember exactly how she worded it, but the essence of her point was, “Your health is the most important thing, right?” I had to admit that she was right. My immediate health was of primary concern, even though I often put that concern aside to take care of everyone else – a habit that many women have passed down from generation to generation. Women tend to take care of everyone but themselves and only tend to their own needs once everyone else’s needs have been met. My mother-in-law was one of those moms, and in the end, that was what killed her. She spent her whole life taking care of everyone but herself, and by the time she got the wake-up call to address her own issues, it was too late. It breaks my heart, because she was a beautiful and vibrant woman whom I admired very much.

Women aren’t the only ones who do it; men have a frustrating tendency to downplay their illness and injuries because they don’t want to admit their vulnerabilities and because they value their ability to be the provider for their families above all else. 

So why do we do this? Why do we ignore the pain in our back, the signs of high blood pressure, or our growing waistline? The thought goes that taking time to care for ourselves is taking away from our “priorities,” and so those “very important tasks” won't get done.  We assume (you know where that gets us) that our work and taking care of our family are our biggest priorities. But what if we looked at it another way?

Our health, both mental and physical, works in a sort of snowball effect. When we ignore the signs and symptoms of illness or injury, those signs and symptoms usually get worse, progressing into bigger and bigger problems. Problems that may become so big that we are unable to work. It may even threaten our life. By addressing the issues as they occur, by making our health a priority (which it should be), we can spend a little time now to avoid a bigger problem later. We can’t earn that paycheck if we are laid up in bed after a heart attack. The first and foremost priority is always to protect your own health so you can continue to provide for the people who depend on you. That’s why the tedious demonstration at the beginning of your flight reminds you to put on your own mask first before helping your child or anyone else – you can’t save your baby if you’ve already passed out.

When my therapist put it to me that way (and believe me, she didn’t use that many words; I came up with all that by myself), it really struck a nerve. All this time I had been resenting my doctor appointments because they diverted my time from things I’d rather be doing, when all the while, I should have been grateful to have this opportunity to figure out what was wrong and to correct it. I should have been grateful for the doctors, the insurance that pays for them, and the medicines we use to make me better. I should be grateful that the doctors were so thorough and so concerned about getting it just right. I shouldn’t begrudge this time; I should embrace it. And when I thought of it that way, everything changed.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that all those other things aren’t important. We still have to get up and go to work, wash the laundry, and get the kids off to school or whatever, but if the laundry is a day or two late because I had an appointment to get an x-ray on the thumb I jammed the day before, or if I have to go back to my doctor for a follow-up on the new medication I started, then I should just appreciate my doc’s due diligence. The laundry can wait, and my boss doesn’t want me to pass out at work because my medication is the wrong dosage. If I hadn’t gone to that mammogram appointment 6 years ago, if I hadn’t followed up with the biopsy or the thorough physical with my primary care physician, I might never have known I had cancer or diabetes until it was too late. Those simple acts of taking time to do what was right for my health saved me from much bigger problems down the road; it probably saved my life. So remember, you can’t look only at the issues that are burning right now. You have to consider the long-term effects of the things you don’t take care of now, too. 

Here are some tips my therapist suggested to help me prioritize, and don’t forget, you can use that handy Eisenhower Matrix we talked about!

• Make your health a priority:  You can’t help others unless you take care of yourself. A broken wheel will upset the whole cart.

• Assess and reassess your tasks and priorities:  What is really important and what can wait. Is the world going to fall apart if you stop and take 5 minutes to schedule an appointment? Keep adjusting the list of priorities as the day or week goes on. Just because you set something as a priority on Monday does not mean it is still the most important thing on Wednesday.

• Do what would help most right now:  If you’re short on time because you need to take a little self-care time, then look at that list of priorities and decide what would be most helpful right now.  Sometimes getting a little win, crossing something quick and easy off your list, or alleviating the burden of a bigger project will help take the weight off your shoulders. And what you choose as “helpful right now” may not be the same thing you would choose as “helpful” tomorrow, so really take a hard look at that list of tasks and do what you can.

• Make the most of what you are doing:  This goes back to Eckhart Tolle and his lessons about being fully present. Don’t go into that doctor’s office thinking about what you should be doing – use that time to focus on your health. Accept the fact that you are there. Be focussed on the reason you are there, and make the most of it. Enjoy the opportunity to take care of yourself. Have enthusiasm for the process of working with your doctor to make you healthy. It is amazingly empowering.

If you are like me and my husband, and you tend to put off your own self-care to take care of your home, your work, or your loved ones, I hope this article has helped you see things in a different light. You can’t build a house with a broken hammer. Fix your hammer, then you can figure out how to build your house. Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll comment below or join us in the Facebook chat group to continue the conversation.