Ever get a case of the Sunday Scaries or Workday Blues? That feeling of stress, anxiety, and dread about going to work that hits us like a truck and leaves us wanting to stay on our couch all night wrapped up in a blanket cocoon.
I’m sure that feeling is all too familiar to you, as it was for me. During my first years of teaching, I was straight up burned out. I hated waking up every day, the stress of an impending observation brought me to tears, and I constantly felt like I was not good enough.
A lot of it was due to being stretched too thin (teaching, grad school, and running an after school program all at the same time) and I had not yet learned the importance of taking care of myself. Also, as a new teacher, I was making all my lessons and activities from scratch (I hadn’t learned about Teachers Pay Teachers yet!) and hadn’t learned to prioritize and manage my time or resources effectively.
Last year, I entered the year with a totally different mindset: I want to have FUN this year. No, I don’t mean that I gave up and showed movies every day!
I set my priorities, and stuck to them. I used technology and grading strategies to cut down on my paperwork and stopped bringing work home. I put my mental health first and invested in taking care of myself. I planned lessons that I thought were engaging and got my students involved in their learning, rather than lecturing or doing buzzword loaded activities that I thought would look good during an observation.
Due to these adjustments and a big change in my mindset, I got my life back. Last year was the first year I didn’t hate my job. It was the first year that I was excited to get in the classroom (okay, not everyday, I am human!) and try new things.
I never want to go back to being that teacher who was stressed out, hating life, and wanting to quit and I don’t want you to be that teacher either!
I want to share with you the ways that I changed my mindset and made adjustments to my teaching to stress WAY LESS and have MORE FUN this year!
Use technology to work smarter, not harder
One of the most dramatic changes in how I worked and saved the most time was converting all my homework assignments, exit slips, and substitute work from paper to online assignments accessible on students’ smart phones, computers, or tablets.
This took me some time up front, but if you already have your assignments digitally in a format that you can copy and paste (or snip images) into a Google Form, you can save even more time.
Since Google Forms can be accessed from any smart phone or internet connected device, my students like being able to complete their homework on their phone while they’re on the train, at home, or during their free periods in school. I printed out about 10 paper copies for any students who did not have access to a computer.
Now, here’s how I assign and grade homework:
1) I assign homework once a week. It’s an overview (think: NewsEla article or chapter reading) of our upcoming topic with NYS Regents questions for reading comprehension and test preparation skills.
2) The students’ answers are compiled into a spreadsheet where I can easily read them and enter their grades into my grading system.
My school uses Jupiter Ed as a school-wide grade book and communication system, so I converted all my Google Forms into Juno Pods (their version of an online assignment). Since it’s on the same platform, I can grade the assignment and it automatically enters the grade in my gradebook. If you use Google Classroom you can connect to the Google Classroom Gradebook for similar features.
In addition to homework assignments, I also use paperless exit tickets, reflections, and this year, I even started to make online substitute assignments for the days that I was absent so that I didn’t have to come back to a stack of handouts to grade!
Setting up a system to create online homework and assignments has been one of the biggest time savers. You can use Google Classroom for FREE! I highly recommend investing a few hours of your time in setting up a Google Classroom if your school doesn’t have an online grading platform that you like using.
Limit what you grade to what really matters
For all the new teachers out there: NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE GRADED! This took me a loooooong time to learn! I was grading homework every week, classwork every day, and piles on piles of exit tickets! I was drowning in grading.
Now, I make sure that what I assign is valuable and important to my students’ growth.
I don’t usually grade classwork because classwork is practice and is supposed to be full of mistakes. I constantly circulate the room providing them with feedback and helping them stay on task. I ask them to revise their work if I think it can be better, and I draw little smiley faces or stars next to work that I find to be excellent. You’d be surprised how motivated a 16 year old is to earn a smiley face, especially if it’s drawn in a glitter pen :).
For weekly assessments, I give Do Now quizzes that are 5 NYS Regents review questions from the topics that we learned that week. For these short quizzes, I usually have a student grade them. I have some students that come hang out in my room during their lunch or free periods, and I put them to work! I usually train one or two students that become my student helper during the year and make sure to give them a small token of my appreciation at the end of the year for their help. Of course, I check over the grades when I’m entering them and make any corrections, if needed. However, since it’s usually multiple choice questions, there is very little room for error.
Lastly, for writing assignments, I create a rubric that has a feedback checklist on it where, instead of writing the same individual comments over and over again, I can check off which feedback applies to their writing. Here is the one that I use!
This saves me so much time when grading writing assignments because I used to write the same feedback over and over again on everyone’s paper. Now, I can just check off a box! Of course, if it’s very specific, I’ll write it on their paper, but for the most part, I save a lot of time!
My last grading tip is to assign writing assignments or bigger grading tasks strategically. For example, I run a musical theater program and I know that the week of my show I am extremely busy! I don’t assign any major essays or projects that need to be graded during the week of my show because I know I will not have time to grade it!
Be more selfish
If this advice seems to be everywhere, it’s because it’s true. When you’re a teacher (or in any job where you give so much of yourself to others) being selfish is often necessary.
Maybe this scenario is familiar to you:
It’s Friday at 3 pm, you have a stack of essays on your desk. You pack them in your bag to grade them on Sunday. You feel guilty and stressed all weekend and then on Monday you’re already exhausted because you never actually gave yourself a day off, but rather planned and graded, or made yourself feel so guilty about not planning and grading that you still had work on your brain all weekend long.
That was me my first years of teaching until one day, I just stopped. I just stopped bringing work home unless it was absolutely necessary and I started making my mental health as important as work. I invested more time and money in myself. I forced myself to leave work by 4:15 to exercise and get home with enough time to cook a healthy dinner instead of ordering take out. I started going to therapy and saying “no” at work to things I wasn’t passionate about. Instead of saving all those gift cards, fancy soaps, and nice bottle of wine for “someday special”, I used them on a regular weekday evening.
Learning how to say no and how to put my needs first dramatically changed my life. I no longer feel exhausted all the time or frustrated about how my efforts at work went unnoticed or unappreciated.
Plan more Student Centered Lessons
Does planning stations, gallery walks, or Socratic Seminars sound exhausting and time-consuming?
Well, here’s the thing that I realized about planning: I would rather spend an hour finding engaging sources, setting up groups, and setting up my room with different table configurations than spend a whole day trying to battle with bored teenagers.
When my student-centered lessons are taking place in the classroom, I can spend my time circulating the room, engaging with students one on one or in small groups, giving them feedback. It’s also so rewarding, because this is when you get to see all your hard work as a teacher pay off as your students are creating, researching, writing, discussing and taking ownership of their learning.
I genuinely feel so much less tired after a day of supporting my students through a gallery walk or facilitating a Socratic Seminar than I do when I have the days that I’m in front of the class providing direct instruction.
Making these four changes to my mindset and work habits took me from stressed out and hating life to being able to enjoy the great parts about being a teacher and to work on having an actual life outside of just being a teacher.
While it may feel strange to leave those papers on your desk or to go for a manicure at 4 pm on a Wednesday, it will be so worth it when you can smile on your way into your classroom, excited for the fun you are going to be having that day.
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