“It’s Christmas Day,” said Scrooge to himself. “‘I haven’t missed it.”
I wonder how many teachers share Scrooge’s fear, in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, that Christmas will pass them by; not in the bah humbug sense but because we are so absorbed with work we fail to be fully present in the rest of our lives as we sleepwalk to the end of term. Christmas can very much sneak up on us.
Allow me to take you on a journey through some of my ghosts of teacher Christmas past. I’ve written a book on wellbeing, and I regularly give others advice on mental health, and yet I’m sometimes pitifully slow at taking this advice myself.
A Christmas Carol: tips for teacher wellbeing
Absent presence
I remember, a few years ago, an evening when, having had quite a mauling in a review meeting, I attended, yet barely noticed, my son’s Christmas concert. I was stressed about work, and was spiralling about what might happen next. In the end, none of those worries were realised. But they stopped me from being truly present at the concert. One of the hardest things for teachers, particularly if we have leadership responsibilities, is to avoid the phenomenon of “absent presence”.
The lesson: Sometimes we have to build boundaries in terms of our time and energy. One of these might be to have a definite ritual in terms of how you “clock off” each day. Is there a walk to the station? A packing away of the school laptop that can give you the mental and physical signal that it is time to switch into non-work mode?
Rest of life avoidance
A few years ago, I found myself being admitted to hospital with a serious throat condition four days before Christmas. I’d ignored various symptoms, and battled to get marking up to date, all the data on the system and everything else done before the end of term.
I had also been picking up and dropping the children off a lot more than usual because my wife had broken a bone in her elbow earlier that week. That, too, was a consequence of my overworking. She had fallen while hanging the outside Christmas lights that I had been “too busy” to do the previous weekend. In my mind, all those work things needed to be ticked off before the holidays could begin.
The lesson: As I have got older, I have got better at making sure that my focus on work doesn’t fall into ROLA (rest of life avoidance). Sometimes this means intentionally adding family events to my work calendar and scheduling time to rest and shop. Just as in work we need to organise to ensure things happen, so, too, in the rest of our lives.
What really matters?
Early on in my career, I got my first and biggest lesson in what really matters. We spent our first Christmas as parents in a neo-natal unit eating a lukewarm hospital Christmas dinner. Our son, who was born 12 weeks early weighing less than 600 grams, had spent his first nine weeks in an incubator. I had taken some time off work, then gone back to work but barely functioning. As term ended, he took a turn for the worse and it looked for a couple of days as if we might lose him. Thankfully, he pulled through and it was a special, if unusual, Christmas. As I returned to work in the January, many books were unmarked, some documents were not filled in, my pigeonhole was full and the displays were still tatty but none of it ended up mattering.
The lesson: We are often slow to learn that the job we do is important but our health and our families matter much more. Even if the worst does happen and we are out of action for a while, things will continue. We are not indispensable at work and we must be careful not to believe our own career hype.
So, as you look forward to the next few days, stop, breathe and notice what is around you. Decide what to buy your nearest and dearest (at the last minute), make plans to spend time with a friend and add family events to your diary so that you get the joyous and restful holiday you deserve.
Our friends, family and our future selves require that we are fully present in the moment. May we learn the lessons of managing the seasonal workload.
Chris Eyre is a teacher of religious studies, a senior examiner and author of a number of books including The Elephant in the Staffroom, his 2016 book on wellbeing. He tweets @chris_eyre
