If you had told me that it would take me five years of teaching to figure out how to mentally leave work at work then I might not have continued in this career. I’ve gotten incrementally better at it each year but this year I’ve committed to prioritizing it. Here are a few things I’ve learned that help me do that. I hope you can, especially if you’re just starting out, find a piece of advice that will help you live a more balanced life.
I’ve grown to admire a kind of teacher I used to disregard — the teacher who knows she could create a better lesson than the one she taught last year, who knows she could help a student bring a B to a B+ with after-school tutoring, who knows she could do wonders coaching the basketball team, and who makes a principled choice not to do any of that.
That principle is:
It’s better for me to do 90% of what I know I can do this year if that 10% I save for myself means I’ll still be a teacher next year.
Cresswell’s post exemplifies that self-discipline. His post is practical also. He offers four of his best strategies for making teaching sustainable. Comments are closed here, but I hope you’ll load up his blog post with strategies of your own. This job can’t have enough of them.
