As a teacher, it is easy to find yourself in a state of being pretty negative at school. Not necessarily with the students, but with other teachers and staff in the building. The cycle of negative talk-particularly negative teacher self-talk- is one that can consume school buildings in various spots, in entire hallways or sections, and in entire buildings. It manifests into people not wanting to come to work. Think about it like the culture and climate of your brain. The thoughts that we are thinking when we wake up, the ideas that cross our minds throughout the day while we are making millions of decisions, and the contemplations that we feel driving home are all indicators of who we are as people and where we are at in terms of self-care and belief about our work. Simply, we are our thoughts. This post is all about the connection our thoughts have to our actions and bodies. If we can talk about negative teacher self-talk in a way that helps combat fatigue and negativity in the workplace, we have a shot at changing our point of view. First, recognize the signs of negative teacher self-talk in yourself and in others:

1. Significantly reduced patience with classroom management (Quick to snap)

2. Increased levels of stress and anxiety

3. Trouble sleeping or waking up with a 3 am a to-do list

4. Taking work home to your significant other or family in a counter-productive way or bottling up completely about the issues at work to appear like you are fine

5. Lack of creativity or energy in lesson planning or delivery

6. Not wanting to get up to go to work for repeated days in a row

During this past week of school, I had a realization that the newness of the back-to-school season was starting to wear off. I found myself getting used to routines with remote teaching, and I felt like I finally had some organization to my day-to-day schedule again. With this feeling, almost always comes the anticipated dread of the stacking up of the paper pile. Whether this stack is in-person or virtually in a Google Classroom, this pile can feel draining. I can insert other words all associated with burnout. I wanted to do a round-up of posts about grading in general on the blog that I have used throughout the years. Some of these posts are more general posts about grading categories, reflections on blocking out time, and trying to manage the load. Some of these posts are about specific ways that I work through larger assignments to give feedbacks (Hello, conferences and using rubric codes). You will also see a vulnerable post that started the blog in 2017 where I admitted that working through the giant stacks of paper is one of the reasons I would ever consider leaving teaching. As teachers, managing the to-do list and paper load is one of the most important points we make in our own self-care. My hope is that you find a strategy that lightens the stack you have growing on your teacher's desk or in your inbox. Check out these 15+ posts to inspire your grading routine.

The TED Talk tagline of “ideas worth spreading” is a powerful message about sharing the power of the human voice to transform the everyday experience. Whether it is Luvvie Ajayi urging us to step outside of our comfort zone or Shonda Rhimes telling us to slow down and enjoy the power of play, we learn from shared human experience. A TED Talk is a teacher. A voice that can reach out and inspire others to feel something different or think about something in a new way. Teachers are living TED Talks each day. However, the work of being a living TED Talk in education can be exhausting. The work we do is heavily reliant on our communities and each other when we feel like we are tired, discouraged, or on the edge of burnout. This post is a collection of 10 TED talks that are compiled for the purpose of inspiration to the classroom teacher or person in education who needs to find a small nugget of truth to feel rejuvenated and refreshed. The small “ah-has” are where we find the strength to continue to find meaning inside and outside of our classrooms.

The title of this post isn’t serious. I know you are tired. If you are teaching, you perhaps have hit a wall called the “November Blues.” These are the feelings you get waiting on Thanksgiving Break. Everything is starting to settle down. For me, the first round of testing is done, routines are established, the first round of parent-teacher conferences are over, and the second set of grades will be due soon. The expectation of who we are in my classroom is going strong. There is still work to do in terms of lifting literacy, inspiring new thoughts, and building capacity for compassion, but we will get there. While November is when everything starts feeling stable, it is also the first time in the year when I often suffer from “paralysis of the mind” or teacher burnout. 

Pernille Ripp asked her readers in her post “What Did You Want to Be This Year?”: “Did you accomplish the goals you set out to reach or did you realize that your life needed something else?”  Pernille Ripp’s blog is one of my favorites because she makes me think and reflect on who I am as a teacher. I love any situation that puts me in student-mode because I am ever learning. Ever since I saw her speak in March at the Michigan Reading Association Conference, I often remind myself of her words: “It is time to be reading warriors” and “for too long we have been too nice.” As I doodled these phrases in my journal during the conference, I nodded my head, I scrunched my nose, I squinted my eyes, and I did some reflecting on my own work. Now, as I close out the 2018-2019 year, I want to focus on what I wanted for myself in my classroom, in my writing lab, and in my teaching life this past year.

And to answer her main question, I accomplished some goals and I realized my teaching life needed something else.

This post outlines the emergency response to helping you calm your teacher brain. This is what worked for me in a big moment like this example, and also in small moments when I feel like everything is piling up. Both types of moments can call for a teacher to scream, “TIME OUT,” and take a moment to breathe. This isn’t the first time I have written about teacher stress, but I wanted to share what worked for me when I was having a particularly difficult time dealing with the amount of stress.

The conversation about teachers leaving the field of education is a real one. We hear the statistics early on: Teachers leave within the first five years of their career, new teachers struggle with anxiety and depression, the field of education is shrinking as a whole, and so on. The problem is all teachers feel all of these things at every point of their career. Teaching is hard. All the time. If it were easy, everyone would do it and attempt to do it well. But, we exist among those that are self-labeled as crazy for doing what we love to do. We are all going to have mornings where we don’t feel like going, where we drag ourselves to the doorstep of our buildings just to hold on to our coffee cups tighter. But the bottom line is, there are so many good things about this job that make a teacher want to keep teaching. And the truth is that the silent urge to constantly quit all the time is a friendly reminder we are doing the hard work. I often will scroll Indeed just to see what is out there or to feel like I have professional options. However, I have been faced twice with the option to leave, and I cannot do it.

When I first started working on this post, I looked up synonyms for anxiety. Not that I needed a definition, I just was curious what would pop-up on the page. The word that stuck out to me the most was mistrust. As English Teachers and teachers in general, we mistrust ourselves based on our profession workload because it is a.) overwhelming and b.) important work. We come to grasp that we can never achieve perfection, and for many perfectionists, this means in our minds we think we are settling. Teacher anxiety does not apply to just English Teachers alone, but the volume of paper and grading that is specific to the teaching of English creates an interesting dynamic where we often feel behind, tired, and downright depressed. I am not putting on the table that other subjects do not have grading issues, but there is a special place in my soul that dies a little when I take 76 MLA research paper rough drafts home to grade.