Teachers struggle for balance

While the COVID-19 struggles have put student stress under the microscope, many students are ignorant of how pandemic hardships have impacted the instructors at the front of the room. Teachers are forced to put on a strong face and show up every day, ready to answer questions with a smile. Even though some are mistakenly convinced that teachers only live to give homework, there is much more going on once one pulls back the curtain. Over half of the teachers who responded to the stress survey ranked their stress as a four or a five on a one to five scale.

After the difficulty of teaching online, coming back to school was much needed by many teachers.

“I’m very happy to be back in person,” guidance counselor Heidi Wheaton said. “I think it was harder to not be here in school and trying to reach students and staff and everything from not being all together. I’ve been feeling better being back in the building. That has relieved some of my stress.”

But even though classes are back in classrooms, that doesn’t mean all stress has dissipated. 

“Most of my stress is internalized from students in terms of seeing how they’re coping with the stresses of their everyday life and commiserating with them in that regard,” Global English teacher William Brydon said. “I’d like to say that I’m an empathetic person, so when I see others stressed, I think it can add to my stress load as well.”

Keeping a healthy mix of school and home life is also a concern for Brydon.

“The other part of it is just like a student, trying to balance what we have going on here in school with what we have going on outside in our outside lives,” he said. “Trying to find a balance between the two feels a little harder to do now that we’re reeling from the effects of the initial wave of the pandemic.”

One staff member who anonymously responded to the survey also struggles to find time to relax between all the out-of-class work that comes with being a teacher.

“The other day at a staff meeting, we did an activity in which we graded different parts of our life. One category was having fun. I put a D,” they said. “When I talked to other teachers they put mostly D's and F's because there just isn't time to have fun. I'm stressed that my life consists mostly of work, and if I try to make it more than that, I get behind and am not doing well at my job. It feels like there is no winning when I have to do two-thirds of my job outside of school and when I have so many students to take care of.”

During virtual learning, Wheaton struggled with outreach among students.

“It’s stressful to make sure that students are safe,” she said. “And to make sure they know that even if they’ve never been to the counseling office or they don’t know who their counselor is, or if they’ve run into a problem or they have a friend who’s having an issue, they can always come talk to someone here.”

Spanish teacher Rick Webster sometimes finds it difficult to give students the help they need.

“We as teachers are faced with more students who struggle since January of last year,” he said. “There are just a lot of kids that did not do well at at-home learning, and I didn’t become a teacher to watch kids fail. I want to help them be successful and sometimes you’re just not able to help them. That can be very frustrating.”

For Principal Erin Kohl, the COVID-19 precautions are difficult to enforce.

“The mask mandate is very stressful,” she said. “Just trying to hold kids accountable to wearing the masks so that we can stay in person and don’t have to go virtual is another stressor for me.”

Learning in bedrooms and pajamas has made it harder for math teacher Doris Bailey to know what her students have already mastered.

“I think since students were online, the difficulty now is not truly knowing what students learned during COVID,” she said. “There are gaps and we’re not sure that they’re there until they just suddenly come up. The difficult thing now is recovering from that.”

Webster wants students to know that while they feel pressure from homework and tests, teachers too feel the weight of responsibilities that come with their job.

“We have a certain amount of material that we feel obligated to cover. Things that we know are important for our students to know to move on to the next class. We feel pressured to get that done,” he said. “The other side of that is, we feel pressured to have the students understand it. Just covering it isn’t enough, but covering it in a way they’re able to understand so they can move on.”

Many teachers sacrifice a lot behind the scenes to keep classes running smoothly.

“Staff members right now are giving up a lot of their planning and prep time to help cover classes because there’s just a shortage of subs,” Kohl said. “When teachers are waiting for COVID test results, that sometimes takes three or four days to get back,  so we just have a lot of need for teachers to cover for other teachers. We even have teachers giving up both of their prep periods in the day to sub, meaning they have zero preparation and planning time during the day.”

Bailey hopes students don’t take it personally when teachers have an off day.

“When we’re in a bad mood, it’s not necessarily because of them,” she said. “It’s more we’re stressed over outside things, not necessarily what’s happening in school. We have other lives too. Everybody has a bad day, and it might not have anything to do with school.”

Brydon believes a stronger connection between teachers and students can be forged through shared empathy.

“Everybody is a human being at heart whether they’re staff, a student, or anybody in this building,” he said. “We all have lives outside of here; this isn’t the only thing that defines us. If we can meet each other on that common ground of shared experience, I think things will go a lot more smoothly in the classroom and in life because you’re able to see the other side and work with people rather than against them.”

Even though it may take a student a long time to complete a homework assignment or write an essay, it takes teachers just as long, if not longer, to get grades in the grade book.

“I wish students understood what it’s like to keep up with the grading with that many people,” social studies teacher Andrew Britton said. “When you’re a student, I think you only focus on what you do, but from a teacher’s point of view, grading is really stressful. That would be the one thing I wished students realized.”

Even though some students may be oblivious to what teachers go through, not all turn a blind eye to the struggles of others.

“My parents are teachers, so I see the things that you wouldn’t think would stress people out but definitely do,” sophomore Michael Mueller said. “It sucks to see the littlest things can get to a teacher that you wouldn’t think would as a student. All the work we’re putting in, they’re putting in that too, and more. Students forget that, yes, we’re at school, but so are they. They get there before and stay after and are working on the weekends.”

Schmid acknowledges the difficulty teachers experience when trying to help students manage their stress.

“It’s probably one of the more stressful things that teachers have to deal with. It’s hard to help someone if you don’t really know how to help them,” he said. “You can’t just say, ‘be calm.’ You see this kid that you don’t really know that well, and you’re just trying to help them, but you don’t really know how they’re doing.”

In terms of dealing with stress, Brydon takes a break from electronics and connects with people close to him.

“I cope by spending as much time as I can with my family, unplugged,” he said. “I have to put my phone on do not disturb because I’ll check emails constantly. I’ll have to keep my Chromebook in a cabinet I can’t reach easily. I do things like that so I can rely on my family for the strength they give me.”

Movement and separation of work and home prove to be an antidote for stress for Webster.

“I think I’m on day 59 of 10,000 steps a day. It wasn’t good last year, for sure, so I’m trying to do more exercise,” he said. “I’ve always been pretty good at when I leave the building, I leave the building. Not that I don’t get the emails from students if they send it to me at 11 o’clock at night, but I’ll respond to that when I get back to the building the next morning.”

Exercise and family time also help Kohl mitigate her stress.

“Every morning I get up and go to a gym that I belong to, and I work out every single morning, five days a week,” she said. “That exercise helps me relieve stress. And just spending time with my husband. My kids are all in college, so they’re not at home, but when I see them on weekends, that’s fun. Just doing things that I love to do.”

Students can help out teachers by communicating with them more.

“I do think students could email me more if they’re struggling,” Britton said. “From a teacher’s point of view, you don’t really know what’s going on in the heads of students or what’s going on in their life. So whenever a student emails me and says, ‘things at home are really rough right now’, it’s much easier for me to say, ‘it’s okay if you turn this in late.’”

Brydon wants to create a safe environment for students to feel comfortable opening up to staff members. 

“Talk to us in person. I know sometimes teachers may seem unapproachable, but I truly believe there’s not a staff member in this building that wouldn’t welcome a student coming up to them and saying, ‘hey, I’ve got this going on,’” he said. “We want to hear what’s going on in your lives because we can be more flexible than people give us credit for. We’re ultimately here to help you succeed outside of these walls, not keep you in them. School shouldn’t be a cage, more so a trampoline to your dreams.”