We should not quit a job because we have been given too much to do and we can’t handle it. We keep our jobs by simply doing less. We don’t coach that team. We don’t volunteer for that activity. We protect our balance and our mental health. We don’t stress so much about kids who look and act like they don’t want to learn. Most schools, with all their committees and activities, are seriously out of balance and if they were people they would be labeled as clinically insane.
And why, in the case of very often younger teachers, do they often work themselves into a frazzle and want to quit their jobs after having gone to all the trouble to get it? They do so because they accept that they have to do all the work offered to them. They need to grow up and stop that overwork. Nobody really cares, and the same administrators those young teachers take such pains to impress now are usually the same administrators who are gone through the revolving door the next year or after it, so the approval-seeking teacher is now stuck with trying to impress the new administrator.
Don’t impress others. Take care of yourself. Many of us in teaching are approval seekers. We don’t have to be. What we consider a great lesson that provides lots of input that will lead to real gains in our students might be met with less enthusiasm by a clueless observer than a lesson in which we give a dictee and a free write. In the latter lesson the kids are clearly happy, because they think that writing means learning. To them, counting words in a free write means they are learning. So stop seeking the approval of people who know nothing of the art that is our work with CI.
Thomas Merton reminds us:
“To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone with everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”