Heidi Wells
Heidi Wells is a veteran English and reading educator entering her 35th year of teaching in middle and high schools.
Teachers dread different things about returning to the classroom each year—wearing real clothes, timing restroom breaks, and having to squeeze breaks to eat into a rigid schedule. My own reluctance before embarking on year 35 of my teaching career came from anticipating the exhaustion that will become my constant companion.
It is not the exhaustion that comes from spending a day in the garden coaxing flowers and cursing weeds. It is the exhaustion unique to teaching: the kind that takes root by the end of the first week and grows into a weeping willow of self-doubt, self-criticism, and self-flagellation as the year progresses.
Much of that exhaustion comes from the number of questions teachers answer every day.
Should I reteach the lesson? Call home? Change the assignment? Give more support? Challenge students more? Do I document that or not? Are my grades syncing? Did I remember the accommodations? Did I notice the student who is unusually quiet? What did I miss?
Some decisions are significant. Others seem laughably small. Without hyperbole, I answer, “Can I go to the bathroom?” about three dozen times a day. Yet, even that requires judgment: Is the student escaping a difficult assignment, meeting a friend, or simply needing the restroom?
Eventually, these decisions accumulate. By the end of the first quarter, many teachers find themselves asking, “Is this really worth it?” The world calls it burnout. Teachers call it questioning our life choices.
These concerns are not merely anecdotal. Hundreds of studies following thousands of teachers all report the same thing: workload, time pressure, and student-related challenges are the gremlins that demand our attention. We don’t need more studies to tell us this; we are the living data.
Yet, when teachers say they are overwhelmed, the response is often another lesson in self-care. Set boundaries. Practice mindfulness. Take a walk. Don’t work after work. Remember your why.
Teachers know our why.
We come to work because we care about students. That is precisely why the work can be so exhausting. Teachers don’t just teach. We document, analyze, communicate, differentiate, attend meetings, enter data, learn technology, manage behavior, and monitor interventions. We worry about students—constantly.
Much of this work is invisible. No one sees the decision to slow down a lesson because a student’s face tells us they aren’t ready to move on. No one sees the hallway conversation with a struggling child or the mental list teachers carry home.
Teaching requires extraordinary emotional labor. This labor often manifests physically—constant fatigue, hiding like a hermit at home because we just can’t face one more interaction, and limiting our own social time with friends and family.
Addressing teacher burnout isn’t simply about making teachers happier. It potentially affects learning, relationships, classroom dynamics, and students themselves. But is this an individual teacher problem or is it built into the systems of our profession?
I don’t say that lightly. My 34 years of teaching have been a blessing. My students have made me better, and I hope I have done the same for them. I don’t want a less meaningful profession. I want a profession that leaves enough of me intact to experience its meaning.
We need fewer things competing for the same finite energy.
I call this educational triage. Teachers are constantly deciding what requires immediate attention, what can wait, and what can be surrendered altogether.
The most valuable renewable resource teachers have is energy. And even renewable resources need time to regenerate, much like characters in video games in which our students are proficient.
Maybe instead of asking teachers to carry these burdens more gracefully, leaders should ask what they can take off our shoulders. Even the strongest teacher must eventually put something down.
I challenge school leaders to examine district and school policies for redundancies and competing goals. Consider what old initiatives can be phased out as new ones are adopted. Just as teachers use triage to prioritize student learning, administrators should do the same thing for the policies and procedures that direct that learning.
There is no simple answer to teacher burnout, but I know teachers can love our students and still be exhausted. We can love teaching and still wish the work were different. We can be grateful and still reach a point where we have nothing left to give.
Water the beautiful willow but don’t allow its roots to become so waterlogged and dense that they ultimately kill the tree.
Maybe the question shouldn’t be: How can we make teachers more resilient?
Perhaps it should be: Why are we requiring so much resilience in the first place?