Somehow it’s June. We have just left the wettest May on record. And, before that, we lived through the driest of Aprils. So you might have forgotten that this year we also had the hottest March day since 1968. It was the first warm spring evening of the year. Outside, a sky of softly fading blue promised rest, with barely a cloud in view save the painter’s feather-strokes of an end-of-day cirrus.
I put my pen down and I paused, taking my cup of tea into the garden. The milk-white of the camellia was in full flower. The tiny cream bell-blooms of my pieris forest flame shrub sent their soft scent drifting over me, drawing my tired eye to the red leaves starting to shoot. A blackbird and a song thrush fought it out for dominance of the street’s gardens, bouncing their last songs against the houses’ walls, until a bold robin’s song started up and soon trumped them both.
The traffic on the hill was starting to die down and through the open windows of next door, I could hear my neighbour’s children playing, the boy of the family narrating his own game. A curious bee approached me, regarded me for a moment, paid me scant mind and moved on. The whole world was slowing down around me. Those sorts of evenings are when I’m most convinced that this life is just so blummin’ beautiful.
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I have often advised students trying to revise to take breaks, to pace themselves, to let their brain breathe. Now I have finally learned that it is time I started heeding my own advice, taking my own medicine.
Teacher wellbeing: Finding a better work-life balance
Physician heal thyself. Teacher learn your lesson. Since the experience of lockdown, I have become determined to have a better balance in my life. Sometimes I need to simply be. I need to breathe. At a few points in my career, I have stepped down from management positions to rebalance my life and I have never regretted it for a moment. Much as I sincerely believe that teaching is a calling, a vocation, a mission, if you will, it is also just a job. It is work. And it’s a truism that we should work to live, not live to work. We have to have a wider vision for our own lives than the classroom and the staffroom, or what are we taking up room for?
As a job, teaching is a lot like a gas: it will fill whatever space it is given. And, like many gases, if you don’t handle it very carefully, then eventually it might start to suffocate you. I doubt there’s a teacher alive who hasn’t regularly been buried beneath exercise books or found themselves drowning in data. It can be all-consuming, with us who are being consumed.
So I am trying to do something new this June. I am learning to identify birds from their song, plants from their blooms. I’ve been using apps that often seem to tell me that I’ve come across some strange rare alien species of bird, of which the RSPB needs to be informed immediately, or a plant that grows only in one shady spot of a remote Himalayan peak for a single day every century. Of course, I may not be using the apps properly. But at least I’m trying.
In the past few years, there has been a lot of attention on managing teacher workload and stress. I am fortunate to work in an institution that has radically reduced paperwork in recent years, freeing teacher energy for the real job of teaching. Thank goodness. There are lots of useful books about, filled with lots of useful tips about work-life balance and teacher wellbeing. There’s even been a government working group on the issue, and we all know that government working groups are always bound to work.
In his excellent 2017 book The Elephant in the Staffroom, Chris Eyre writes extensively about teacher stress and how best to manage it. In his conclusion, Eyre says: “Our wellbeing is at least partly our responsibility. We can and must help ourselves and each other.” He is right. How we respond to our circumstances is our responsibility. And, as any biology teacher will tell you, responding is one of the signs of life.
There are deadlines galore in education but the older you get, the more the other deadline looms. We need to embrace our own lives while we can. We need to live. The pressures in education will persist. Tomorrow will have worries of its own. So we must embrace today, especially if today is the start of the final weekend of the half-term break.
Teachers are doing important work that can’t be taken lightly. But the weary worker has earned their rest. The pressures and deadlines of the job have to be managed, like an unruly toddler who demands our attention but who has to be ignored sometimes for the sanity of us all. And we need to take responsibility for our own wellbeing.
Too many teachers have sadly concluded that, for their own good, they have had to leave teaching altogether. All of us are the poorer for that. Rather than leave, I’d hope we weary souls could all carve out some space where we can so we can last for the long haul. I’d hope that we can slow down and take a breath. And as half-term draws to a close and we look to return to work, I intend to try to keep my balance and not let The Dread consume me.
Both the end of half-term and the gradual ending of lockdown tell us that things are slowly starting to return to something that looks a little more like normal. But I want things to be different from how they used to be. I don’t want to go back to normal. Not as normal was, at least. I know I need to slow down and rebalance my life. This is an opportunity, a chance to rethink my life. I need to listen to the birdsong, watch the white of the magnolia ignite, notice the wildflowers in my garden as they bud and begin to explode into colour. I want my soul to swell. So, please, sit down by my side, be quiet with me. Here, have a cup of tea. Take the time, because nobody is going to give it to you. And tomorrow will surely have enough worries of its own.
David Murray is an English teacher at City of Stoke-on-Trent Sixth Form College
