Skip to main content

TEACHERS’ BURN OUT-PART 2 (nah we dey do ourselves)

 Now sometimes we are the ones responsible for our own burnout and stress. The good news is, we can easily decide to look out for ourselves more and know when we are crossing the line.

1. Who convinced all of us that we must take work back home? This part is something educators are very quick to do, it's almost like we tell ourselves that we can do it better when we are home, that may be true but at what price? Bonding time with your friends and family? free personal development time? quality sleep?. If only we can decide today that we’ll try as much as we can to utilize school time for school work and home time for ourselves- we’ll have more quality lives. Who said we cannot do our lesson plans in school, who said that? That time you use in school to chitchat with other teachers, if only we can cut that time into half and use the other half to fill in the blank spaces of our work, we will feel more alive, productive, and less stressed.

Agnes tutors her pupils after school 

2. Most of the time, as teachers that care about the welfare of our pupils, we identify students who we know need extra help, and we then decide to take out time to help them, beautiful! But now the problem is when we don’t plan properly about how that would affect our own personal time, we just take that responsibility and slap it on our free time. First, before you consider tutoring a child during after-school hours, take your time to figure out if it's possible to fix that tutorial during school time, do you have two break periods in your school and you think you could use one of them to get this task done? Is it possible that you come to school 30 minutes earlier so that you can put the child through instead of having to stay in school after school hours?

I don’t have anything against after-school hours lessons, but all I am saying is that you should try and ensure that your school time is properly utilized, don’t be the one who will have free school hours but instead of using those to get your school goals smashed, you decide to leave it till after school hours when you could be resting or doing your own learning. 

Comments

  1. Mr. E9 March 2023 at 02:02

    I think the above mentioned points in this and your previous article are very helpful. Every teacher who means well for his/her learners will put this at the front desk of their thoughts.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HOW MY FATHER TAUGHT ME TO BE AN EDUCATOR

  HOW MY FATHER TAUGHT ME TO BE AN EDUCATOR Looking at my life right now, I cannot help but be reminded of my dad. Nnana was what we called him. He was a very quiet man, keeps to himself, didn’t have friends, at least none that we knew of. Right now I remember him telling us stories of how his journey started, at that point my siblings and I were not really interested in those stories seeing how we roll our eyes when he starts giving us one of the stories, we always got one of those anytime we did something wrong-that was one of his punishment strategies. I really don’t know if it’s me who is missing him or there’s just   a lot of things to learn from the life of my dad as it connects to my job as an educator. My father was never really predictable, except of course with his stories. We were not sure what he would do next and was never a fan of always using the cane. My mom was the typical Nigerian mom, everything was a weapon to massively destroy your bad behavior-the c...
10 comments
Read more

Teaching 9-10 Subjects per day: A blessing or a Curse.

The moment I started teaching my first lessons in my placement school, I knew from that moment that I was only going to be racing against time and the structures put in place to facilitate normal academic activities. Personally, I liked to access the situation of things with my learners before I go ahead to figure out what the best approach for a particular topic would be and since I was sure that most of my learners in primary 4 should be sent back to primary 1 I knew that there was a lot of work cut out for me. Before I start my class I try to research a topic online, I go on YouTube and try to find out very simple ways of teaching division to little kids. With this my kids are always surprised how simple Maths can be when I'm the one who is teaching it because the methods I use are at the level they understand and can relate to, this makes my learners feel like this school thing is not as hard as they thought. But the other side to it is the fact that my methods will usually tak...
1 comment
Read more

PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHERS TEACHING MULTIPLE SUBJECTS. YEH/NEH

If you are a primary school teacher and you teach more than one subject raise your hand.  Do you have subjects you know you have to do more research on before you feel confident teaching them? Do you sometimes feel the need to recheck and double-check things in one or more subjects compared to others? Are there subjects you have outright joy and confidence teaching compared to others? Are there times you wish you just stick to some of these subjects instead of having to pack up everything? To be honest, I understand that most school facilities cannot afford to pay individual teachers to handle each subject, I understand that they expect primary school teachers to know and understand the basic subjects well enough to teach them at preliminary levels, BUT! Are we experimenting with the next generation of Nigerians or are we giving them the best that there is? Our pupils deserve to have the best from every teacher and a teacher can only be his best self if he is teaching what he feels...
Post a Comment
Read more