Our chosen career is tiring.
It can be filled with pointless tasks (updating a scheme of work?) that can seem to have no relevance to the classroom experience.
But I have heard colleagues (and teachers more widely) talk about work/ life balance.
I used to think it was a laudable aim.
Not any more.
Forget work/ life balance. It’s an unattainable, soul-sucking, irrelevance.
Build good habits instead.
The moment I go for something that inspires me, my life goes out of balance.
And I mean goose-pimple-inducing, hairs-standing-on-the-back-of-my-neck inspiring.
As a teenager my mum worried about me not going out. At the weekend I preferred to stay in my bedroom and play guitar.
I remember getting up one day, having breakfast and then sitting in front of my hi-fi and playing parts of a song and attempting to work it out on my guitar. I would painstakingly listen, press stop, rewind, play. Then with guitar in hand begin to try out different things. Until it sounded like what I heard. And repeat.
I did this for what I thought was about an hour, and then I heard my mum say “don’t you want to have any lunch?”
Whaaaaat? Where did the morning go?
Interestingly, after lunch I carried on. And then the next time I looked up, it was dark.
Had I really just spent my whole Saturday trying to work out ‘Under the Bridge’ by the Red Hot Chili Peppers? Yep.
And that wasn’t the first time I did that. My teenage life became a shifting wobble board of studying, reading, and playing guitar. It wasn’t well-rounded. It was an unbalanced chasing of wanting to get good at playing guitar.
Being a teacher demands that we play at the game of developing mastery. At the craft of teaching. At the creation of lessons. At the interpretation of teaching research. At taking care of our well-being so that we can be effective in our chosen career. We can move the wobble board on purpose and choose where we spend our energy and time.
There are no shortcuts to get good at anything. The process is inherently unbalanced.
My experience of my job can feel like continually being knocked off balance.
I check my daily plan and think – I’ll do that marking in my free lesson after lunch, and then give it to the class after. Except – my initials appear on the cover sheet and my heart sinks. How can I mark during a cover lesson? Will the cover be any good? Shall I mark over lunch? Sigh my best laid plans just got blown apart.
I think – when it calms down I will update that *?!$# scheme of work/ book that CPD/ clear out my inbox/ refresh that display. Except it never calms down. I never get the space.
And it never will – that’s the life of a teacher.
I’m not saying education and the teaching profession isn’t flawed.
I’m not saying that workload isn’t an issue, admin isn’t overwhelming, pupil behaviour isn’t a relentless work in progress…
…neither am I saying senior management are perfect, colleagues are readily supportive, or parents will reliably back school rules…
…and I’m not saying I haven’t fallen asleep in a staff meeting, drunk so much coffee in a day I’m jittery, or accidentally put my hand in chewing gum under a table.
What I am saying is that striving for work/ life balance is unrealistic, pointless, and a narrative we can change.
Focusing on creating useful habits is a workable, sustainable alternative.
Habits are those regular, unthinking, low-energy actions we repeat. They can be really good (planning my day) or really bad (eating all the chocolate in the house when it’s there).
We can intentionally create habits that support and nurture who we are (as teachers).
Like daily exercise, eating well, getting enough sleep – blah, blah, blah – you know that. And of course they make a profound difference to long-term effectiveness. But that’s nothing new.
And there are others such as expressing gratitude, meditating, or journaling.
It’s not doing these things that makes the difference. It’s integrating these things into the fabric of our lives that really has the powerful effect.
Here are some specific examples: leave your desk clear at the end of the day, plan out your week…then review it daily (because…you know…life in school messes the plan), or don’t open email first thing in the morning (because it’ll suck your time away).
The real trick to making these sustainable is to start small and build. There are no shortcuts. Relentless consistency works. And there is enough writing, literature, and research about habit-building that is easily accessible.
We can intentionally create good habits. They become a foundation on which we can ground ourselves when we’re inevitably knocked off balance. They build resilience. They allow us to take care of ourselves. They allow us to become better teachers.
Pick one habit. Start small. Track it. Build over time.
And leave behind the unattainable, misused notion of work/ life balance.
Photo by Raphael Renter on Unsplash
James D'Souza 