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