Teacher Expectations Vs Reality On Mental Health

those who can’t do

teach this is something that i heard

once when i was in college

and i asked myself what does that even

mean

does that mean that teachers are

incapable is teaching an easy job

are teachers not doers my name is sydney

leathers i’m a second grade teacher

and i can assure you that i am a doer i

have done plenty of things in my life

i have done 16 hours of labor i’ve done

four years of college

late night study sessions i have done

vacations relationships therapy

i’ve done a lot of different things but

the hardest thing that i had to do

is teach my first year of teaching i

thought i would have it all figured out

i thought that i would come in and take

the world by storm

but it wasn’t long before i realized i

had no idea what i signed up for

my expectation versus reality was

unmatched

in fact the expectation of myself

was greater than what i thought i was

capable of

but i got it done my first year of

teaching

was a pivotal point in my life because

it was when the real world started for

myself

and also when the my concept of

self-care

began to disappear before the pandemic

about 24 to 25 students maybe more maybe

less can be found

in an advertised classroom you can have

students with disabilities you can have

homeless students

you can have students with exceptional

behavior students with extreme

behavior you can have students with

great parent involvement

and you can have students who just need

a little extra help

and with those students you will find a

doer trying to work through it all

trying to create a safe space for their

students

trying to give them an opportunity to

learn

trying to combat testing

back in march i had no idea that we

would be in the situation that we’re in

none of us did all i can think about is

a time

when one of my students came up to me

and she said miss leathers miss leathers

the virus is coming

i had no idea what to respond so i just

told her

everything will be okay just to relax it

will be fine

i did see media coverage of china

combating the virus

but what do you say so i told her to

relax

and it would be okay

later that week school shut down

all i could think about was how i told

this little girl that everything was

going to be okay

in all actuality it wasn’t this is kind

of like how we do our teachers

we tell them everything is going to be

okay despite what’s going on

with your personal life despite all that

you have to do it will be okay just get

the job done

then you have people who say but you

guys get the summers off

yes we do but the summers are for

recovery

the summers are for us spending time

undoing all that we have been doing

for the last nine months it’s time for

us to

focus on ourselves after we have been

neglecting us

for the last nine months this summer was

different it was not like any other

summer

we didn’t have time to really focus on

ourselves because we were

spending time worrying if we were going

to catch covet

worrying about our family members

and arguing about basic human rights

for me the anxiety i felt was

overwhelming

it was a lie because i seen people who

look like me

and people who look like my students

getting murdered in the streets not

not too long after that i had to start

readjusting and thinking about

are we going back to school what are we

going to do

so our summers are for us but

there’s very little time spent focusing

on ourselves

61 percent of educators say that they

find

work almost always or often stressful

when we went back working from home our

expectations only increased

not only did we have to focus on

everything that we knew before

but we had to learn to turn worksheets

into google documents

we had to learn how to locate displaced

students because their families

have lost their jobs

we had to communicate more than ever

before

and as an educator we got it done i

spent time going

to some of my families and donating

supplies because

that’s what i needed to do for me i

wanted them to know that i was there i

wanted them to know that i cared about

them

and not all educators did this but

we all put in extra time and all hands

on deck to make sure these babies knew

what they needed

if this pandemic hasn’t shown us

anything it has shown us that

teachers will survive we will get the

job done

we wear so many different hats and we

take on

so much with little to think about

ourselves

us teachers we are the doers of society

we wear so many different hats and we

get the job done

we take care of our children and

sometimes put ourselves

on the back burner but at what point

will someone start doing for us thank

you