Latest / New Teacher Talk / Ep 158: Surviving October: Essential Time Management and Burnout Prevention for New Teachers

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Ep 158: Surviving October: Essential Time Management and Burnout Prevention for New Teachers · New Teacher Talk

Welcome to New Teacher Talk.
My name is Abby Bartle,
and I am a third-year English teacher at Oswego High School
in Oswego, Illinois.
In today's podcast,
I am so excited to share some of my advice and tips for new
teachers as you wrap up the first few months of your first
year of teaching.
In this podcast,
I will discuss preventing teacher burnouts,
scaling the mountains of grading and lesson planning that
are surely piling up by this point,
navigating parent-teacher conferences and administrator
observations, and managing your time effectively.
Here's how to survive that dreaded October slump.
You may be wondering why I'm allowed to speak on this
topic.
This past year,
I hit the worst October burnout that I've ever experienced,
and I think I was an overachiever and even hit it in mid
-September.
It was my second year teaching,
and while I had the same classes that I had the year
previously, I had taken on several new responsibilities.
I was coaching girls volleyball,
which started back in July.
I was managing our school website.
I was sponsoring an honor society.
I was serving on our team to rewrite our freshman English
curriculum, and I started grad school.
Looking back, it's no wonder that I burned out so quickly.
I dreaded coming to school and going to practice.
I was behind on grading.
I was irritated by my students.
I didn't know how I was gonna make it through the month,
much less the semester.
I apologize to all my colleagues who I incessantly complain
to.
If you can commiserate with any of these feelings,
then this is the podcast for you.
Keep listening for some advice,
advice that I've been following myself during this school
year.
The best advice I have for preventing teacher burnout is
effective time management,
which is a lot harder than it sounds.
Having a healthy work-life balance is key.
It may not be possible for you in your first couple of
years, but do your best to leave work at work.
If you bring anything home,
it needs to be something urgent that cannot wait.
If it can wait, let it wait.
You need that time away from school to relax and reset at
home, especially during those moments of burnout.
Prioritize your mental health.
The best thing for helping me develop my priorities has
been making to-do lists.
Each day,
the last thing I do before I leave school is make a to-do
list for the following day.
I separate it into three parts.
Must do, should do, and nice to do.
Must do tasks are things that I have to get done the next
day,
things that if I can't get them done during my prep period,
I would need to bring home,
such as preparing for the following day's lesson.
Tasks on the should do list are ones that would be really
helpful to get done,
but aren't things that I would need to bring home if I
didn't finish them, perhaps grading essays.
Finally, tasks on my nice to-do list are long-term items,
such as cleaning my desk or a reminder to create subplans
for next week.
These are things that can sit around for a while.
If I can get them done, great,
but they're not things I need to stress about.
Stress.
That is the thing that causes teacher burnout,
and managing stress is difficult, but more than doable.
Maintaining a work-life balance is a good start,
but there are other things you can do as well.
First, try to enjoy a sitting lunch each day,
or at least a couple times a week.
Try not to work through it.
Bring something healthy and tasty and enjoy your break
time.
This could be a time where you get to know your colleagues
better.
Have a conversation with the ones who share your same lunch
time.
Especially in your first year,
it is crucial to connect with your colleagues.
Those are the people you can vent to when you're drowning
and go to for assistance when you need help with a lesson
plan or a difficult student.
Finding your people will help you get through the tough
times.
Your colleagues can commiserate with whatever you're going
through.
I cried to a colleague in my first year and in my second
year,
but both of them helped me figure out how to navigate those
situations I was struggling with.
One note of caution, however,
venting about difficulties is good and even necessary at
times, but too much negativity,
either sharing your own or listening to others' negativity,
can exacerbate your burnout.
Be careful with focusing too much on the negative.
Focusing instead on the positive can help avoid burnout.
If you are feeling the classroom to be a drag,
find ways to rediscover joy in your classroom.
Rediscover what made you want to be a teacher in the first
place.
Engage your students in fun or even silly lessons.
If you're burning out,
the students are starting to feel it too.
Finding something engaging and fun will help give their
brains a break and your classroom management will thank you
for it.
One thing that I absolutely love doing when I'm feeling
burnt out is sending good emails home.
We as teachers are so busy and sometimes the only emails or
phone calls that we have the time to send are the bad ones.
However,
parents and families of good students rarely hear from
teachers and taking the time out of your day to send an
email about a student who has been working hard in class,
who did particularly well on a presentation,
or who improved on something they were struggling with can
mean the world to those families.
Additionally,
it makes me feel great to remember that while there may be
difficulties and struggles,
there are also really great things happening in your
classroom.
Stress is caused by many things in a teacher's day,
but perhaps one of the most stress-inducing things is
grading.
Managing the mountains of grading that are surely piling up
by this point in the year is imperative to managing your
stress and preventing the October slump.
There are three steps to scaling this mountain.
Prioritize, plan, and chunk.
First, you need to decide what needs to get done.
Maybe it's grading 90 essays, 45 practice paragraphs,
and 65 worksheets.
Believe me, I've been there.
Then,
you need to decide what's most important and when you need
it done by.
Maybe the essay is most important since in two weeks they
start writing their next one.
Okay, that's 10 school days away.
When you've got that figured out,
divide the number of things you have to do,
which is 90 essays,
by the number of days you've given yourself to get it done,
which is 10.
That number is how many you need to get through each day,
and nine essays in one day is a much more manageable number
than 90 essays.
Once you've scaled the mountains of grading,
what you see on the other side near the end of the first
grading term is another view that seems nearly
insurmountable.
Parent-teacher conferences.
The best advice I have is to plan, plan, plan.
The more prepared you are for who is coming in,
the more calm and confident you will be when they knock on
the door.
Personally, I print out their grade books and scores,
have the grade book open on my computer,
and have any writing samples pulled open on my computer or
grabbed from their folders.
Most importantly,
I write notes about each student who I know I am going to
have to talk about.
Notes perhaps on behavior, on things they're doing well,
and what they can improve on.
During the fall conferences,
parents also want to know what assignments are coming up in
the future so they can prepare to help their child.
Well,
you might have parents who show up without making an appointment,
or maybe that's the entire format of your conferences,
prepping what you can will save you stress,
and that is always a good thing.
Finally, starting the conference, for me at least,
is always the most difficult part.
I always start by asking the parent if they have any
questions.
If they do, I answer them.
If they don't,
I go into the student's grade in the class and how they're
doing overall,
which I already have written down in my notes.
Having at least a semblance of a script greatly helps me
out during these conferences.
Last final tips,
make sure you dress nice and bring snacks and water.
It is a long, exhausting day, but you can handle it.
Yet another thing that adds stress to a new teacher's day
are observations by administrators.
Luckily, if you're just coming out of student teaching,
being observed is something that you are used to.
For me,
being observed was the most stressful part of student
teaching and it seemed 10 times more daunting now that I
had a real job.
There are a few things to remember.
It's okay if things change and it's okay when things go
wrong.
You'll make a lesson plan,
you'll explain the lesson plan to them,
and things will still go wrong.
The important part about observations is showing that you
can reflect on your teaching and you have ideas for how to
improve the next time that you teach it.
This is a scary thing,
but it really isn't that different from student teaching,
at least from a nerve standpoint.
Admin knows that you are just starting out and they will
want to help you become a better teacher,
not nitpick every little thing they would do differently.
If you can,
have another teacher observe the lesson before your
administrator observes you and get feedback from them.
This could be on the same day or you can stagger your
lesson so you teach it to one class on, say, Monday,
and then you teach it to the class you're being observed in
on Tuesday.
If you can't do that, it's okay.
Take a deep breath, be yourself,
and teach because you know how to teach.
One final thing that I will give tips about is something
that I was surprised to learn that the new teachers in my
department found difficult.
So perhaps I can shed some light on how I personally use my
prep periods effectively and productively.
There is a rotating list of things that I do during my prep
period.
I make to-do lists, I clean my desk,
I discard old or extra papers, I plan lessons,
I organize my unit binders,
I print materials for future lessons, and I grade.
I know that's a lot, but I am extremely type A,
so not all of these things might end up on your to-do list.
Try to do at least one substantial thing each planned
period.
Get a snack, listen to some music, find a quiet spot,
and don't let others distract you.
That's how you get work done.
As I mentioned earlier,
I make a to-do list for the next day before I leave school
each afternoon.
More specifically,
I make a plan for exactly when I am going to get each thing
done during the next day.
Maybe I don't have papers printed,
so I need to get to school early to do that.
That's on the must-do part of my to-do list.
Usually,
I use a highlighter to mark the tasks that I need to
complete before first period.
Then, during my prep period,
I need to grade 10 essays for the day.
During my lunch,
I need to go and check my mailbox and connect with my co
-teacher.
If I have extra time during that period,
I want to tidy up my desk.
That's what I plan before I leave the previous day.
Does my plan ever go exactly how I want it to?
Of course not.
Someone comes and talks to me during my lunch.
A fire drill takes away half of my prep period.
I get a flat tire and make it to school 10 minutes before
the bell rings, which indeed happened during my first year.
Nonetheless, I remake my to-do list before I go home.
I found my prep periods during my first year being
overtaken with lesson planning and grading,
and my desk became a mess and I couldn't enjoy a lunch
period with just my lunch.
Maybe you're feeling the same way.
Here's another tip for avoiding that.
One thing that saved me during student teaching and during
my first year was to plan out one lesson for the following
week each day.
For example, on Monday,
I would prepare next Monday's lesson.
Now, with two years under my belt,
I can stay an entire week ahead.
Lesson planning gets much, much easier,
and I can plan out an entire week in a single plan period,
usually for both of the classes that I teach.
Maybe it sounds like a pipe dream for you now,
but you will get to that point, I promise.
I know I gave you a lot of tips,
so many that perhaps your to-do list is filled with new
things that you want to try.
My last tip,
don't overwhelm yourself by trying to overhaul everything
all at once.
Go step by step and take it slow.
Take another deep breath.
Things will get easier,
and you will make it through October.
Thank you so much for listening to new teacher talk.
I hope you're leaving with some useful ideas to help you
get through the difficult months of the school year.
See you on the other side.
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