Being an educator in a classroom comes with a great deal of unexpected challenges not taught in a higher education course. You don’t learn how to communicate with parents when they have concerns about their child’s development. Your masters degree doesn’t teach how to prioritize your students behavioral health above pushing through a lesson plan. A few of these challenges are learned through experience and unfortunately, this makes the profession difficult to deal with. Teaching elementary for 5 years has allowed me to gain experience handling unexpected events that throw off the flow of an enjoyable teaching experience. I made a youtube video discussing this but in this post, I discuss 4 reasons why teaching may be difficult for incoming teachers.
Unexpected Events
- Dealing with unexpected events as an educator comes with the job. Bathroom accidents, mental health check-ins, reviewing previous lessons are almost never in your schedule. In order to have a functioning classroom that thrives even on your off days, unplanned events are necessary. A 45 minute lesson may be shortened to 25 minutes because of the lecture you had to give your class about their behavior with another teacher. Unexpected events happen and you have to be ok with this.
Family Relationships
- Everything that is taught in the classroom needs to be reinforced at home and for that reason, building family relationships is very important. This can be difficult because every parent is different and the ways they communicate can be challenging. In a post pandemic classroom, teachers utilize various social platforms to communicate with their child’s teacher outside of school hours. As an educator, sacrificing your time off work to effectively communicate with families can be challenging but important to build a cohesive relationship.
Work Life Balance
- Similar to my last point about communicating with parents after school hours, work-life balance as an educator becomes very difficult to manage. Besides communicating with parents, reviewing lesson plans for the following week, inputting grades you didn’t have time for during the school day and responding to emails are a few of the tasks that may need to be done on your personal time. If you don’t learn how to set boundaries with doing work during your personal time, this can easily lead to burnout.
Guilt/Shame
4. Feeling guilt or shame around taking personal days off of work is another challenging factor that comes with being an educator. Fearing things like being behind a lesson, missing out on important meetings, not being able to track a student’s behavior are some of the reasons why you might be apprehensive about taking a day off. To avoid burnout, and as you become more familiar with your classroom, these thoughts come and go and you realize the importance of prioritizing your mental health.
Mastering these skills in a way that can benefit your practice as an educator comes with practice. The core of teaching is the ability to be creative and to work around factors that interfere with your ability to teach. Being an educator is the most rewarding career that I have had the opportunity to experience. At the same time, it has equipped me with many unsolicited adaptability skills that I can carry with me to any endeavor.
Until Next Time~