I’ve been on my first totally (okay…mostly) work-free summer in a few years for the past month. No meetings, few e-mails, not even a ton of work for my own website and book.
Teacher burnout, particularly among behavior teachers, is a real and exhausting part of the job. There are loads of statistics, studies, and scholarly articles about burnout amongst special education teachers. All of this is detached and theoretical.
But what does burnout look and feel like for a behavior teacher?
It is restlessly fighting insomnia on Sunday night because you dread walking into your classroom on Monday because experience tells you that there will be serious meltdowns in store. It’s looking at the clock in your kitchen at 2:35am while you stress-eat dried-out, leftover birthday cake, unable to even focus enough to watch tv, obsessively calculating and recalculating the number of possible minutes of sleep you could get if you were to fall asleep right now.
It is the feeling every August that you’re about to run a marathon for which you can’t properly train because the terrain and distance keep changing. It’s anxiety. It’s a sense that you are often beaten before you ever can begin.
It’s feeling annoyed, irritated, disgusted, and exasperated with kids who don’t seem to be making much improvement in your setting, but who you know won’t be moved to a more appropriate one due to parental refusal, lack of spaces in a better setting, shitty data collection practices, or general apathy. It’s knowing that it isn’t really the kid’s fault, feeling annoyed with the kid anyway, then feeling guilty because you feel annoyed.
It’s buying support materials and supplies with your own money to the point that you know you don’t have adequate savings. It’s knowing that you didn’t do it because you’re a saint who has martyred herself for the good of the students, but because having the right tools makes the difference between raking coals in Hell for a living and getting through the day with a manageable level of pandemonium. It’s feeling like a shitty, selfish human being when people point out how devoted you must be to spend all that money “on the kids.”
It’s a fatigue so crushing in the afternoons at school that you feel as though you’re floating outside of yourself but knowing that you can’t drink a coffee because you can’t leave to go to the bathroom once it kicks in.
It is a knowledge that many of your colleagues don’t think that behavior problems are truly a disability. It’s watching the people with the final say on decisions look you in the eye, then proceed to close in a child’s world in a more restrictive setting without ever having tried interventions with fidelity. It’s watching them refuse to make eye contact when you tell them that least-restrictive environment is the law and that they are breaking it. It’s the helplessness and fury and indignation that consume you as you shout until your throat gives out. It’s having that outburst tallied as yet another reason why you’re a bitch to work with, another reason your opinions are disregarded so someone else can sleep at night while you clean up the mess.
It’s always being an outsider amongst the faculty at school, never managing to truly become a part of the staff and feeling isolated and alone. It’s the bitterness of being a second-class colleague and social pariah.
It’s having nothing left to give your own children when you get home at night. It’s retreating to the chair in your bedroom to read and hoping that that your kids will find something to do so you can sit in silence. It’s the guilt and shame that come from knowing you don’t help enough with homework or provide enough attention because your emotional resources are depleted. It’s promising to do better with your own kids, then failing at it again tomorrow. It’s swearing you’ll use the summer to reconnect, then feeling like they’re strangers and being crippled with regret.
It’s swearing to your spouse that, this time, you won’t ruminate about the shitty things happening at school with your students and your colleagues, then spending an hour before bed venting. Again. It’s losing touch with that relationship because you have nothing to talk about but the relentless circularity of your days. It’s praying you won’t wind up divorced (again) because you can’t balance your job and your home life, because nobody wants to live with a bile-filled sack of righteous fury forever.
It’s the push and pull between totally giving in to apathy and despair and wanting to push students to do better on any given day. It’s knowing that there are days when apathy wins, and feeling shame and disappointment in yourself. It’s becoming defensive and embarrassed when people catch you during a low point.
It’s ruined friendships and bad relationships with the parents of your own children’s friends because you literally CANNOT muster the patience to be gracious when their children behave badly. It’s snapping because you’re emotionally overextended, always standing on the precipice of intolerance. It’s knowing that your own children suffer socially because other parents think you’re an asshole for refusing to lead groups or volunteer at school. But you just can’t do it. It’s feeling like a failure because you can’t do it when it looks like all the parents with “real” jobs can, and you’re just a teacher.
It’s a feeling of guilt when you apply for other positions that are not related to behavior. It’s knowing that once you’re in this line of work, it’s virtually impossible to get out, no matter how hard you try. It’s the knowledge that your expiration date is looming as your efficacy slips. It’s the battle to convince others that you weren’t placed in a behavior classroom due to your own incompetence as a “real” teacher and knowing that, more often than not, you’ve failed to convince them. It’s a knot of guilt and worry in your stomach for colleagues you leave behind if you DO manage to move on.
It’s giving in to the types of unhealthy coping strategies you preach at your students not to adopt. It’s knowing that you’re a hypocrite most of the time.
It’s feeling like you and your students are viewed as disposable. It’s knowing that your program will the first on the chopping block when budget cuts come along due to the high cost of the needed adult:child ratio and the generally low success rate as measured by standardized tests and graduation rates. It’s knowing that, on paper, you appear incompetent and ineffective. It’s always having your guard up, being ready to explain yourself and justify why your job even exists.
There’s probably more I could add. I could certainly write about the rewards of the job, but I don’t think that’s what most of you need to hear.
If you’re a behavior teacher, you need to know that you aren’t alone.
