If you allow it, teaching can consume all of your time.
There’s so much to do.
- lesson planning
- grading
- parent communication
- professional development
- resource creation
- technology integration
- creating assessments
- managing accommodations
- LMS updates
- extracurricular activities
…and that’s just the start.
You want to give your students a great classroom experience.
You want to feel prepared each day.
You want to be an excellent teacher.
So how do you do all that WITHOUT working all day and night?
Let me share a few things that worked for me.
My first year challenges
Let’s travel back to 2011.
It was my first year and it was going about as good as most teacher’s first year (ie. not fantastic). Most days I’d be at school 7:00 AM to get some work done before classes started at 8:30 AM. And then I often worked into the night creating slideshows, finding resources, and grading papers.
It was hard enough feeling like I was always behind in my lesson planning, but the additional challenges of classroom management and learning the school culture made things even more difficult.
My wife, Sara, who was in her 2nd year of medical school, was often also working late into the night studying.
Our lives felt like work 24/7.
They say the first year is the hardest, and that was definitely true for me.
Setting boundaries
If I could say something to my first year self, it’d be this:
Stop.
Working.
Yes, teaching can be all-consuming, and yes, any new career is going to have a learning curve.
But if you want be able to stick it out beyond 3 years, you’ve got to learn how to draw a line. Otherwise, you’ll likely burn out.
Here’s what worked for me: Setting a non-negotiable time to stop working each day.
If your classes are out at 3:00pm, decide that you will stay at school until 5:00pm and once 5:00pm hits (set at alarm on your phone), stop working. Leave your computer at work. Go home and enjoy your evening with your family.
On weekends, procrastinate on purpose and wait until Sunday at 3:00pm to start working on lesson plans and limit yourself to 2-3 hours.
If you start on Saturday, that could bleed into Sunday, and before you know it, you worked all weekend.
Something interesting happens when you know you HAVE to finish your work by a certain time…
Parkinson’s Law
Parkinson’s Law - work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion.
The more time you give yourself to complete a task, the longer it will take to complete the task. If you give yourself all evening to plan a lesson, it’ll take the entire evening.
If you give yourself two hours to complete the same task, you’ll get it done in two hours.
It’s incredible how a deadline sharpens your focus and efficiency.
Forced to prioritize
When you’re confronted with a looming deadline, you’re forced to decide which work HAS to get completed before tomorrow.
Lets say you have the following tasks to complete before tomorrow:
- hang student work
- grade a math quiz
- respond to a parent email from this afternoon
- prep for tomorrow’s science experiment
- give feedback on written reflections.
Instead of just doing the tasks in the order you think of them, do them in the order of most urgent and important. Then if you run out of time, you just push the rest of the list to tomorrow.
- prep the science experiment - you NEED that for tomorrow
- reply the parent email - it’s good to get to those within 24 hours
- grade the math quiz - timely feedback is important; better yet, use tools like Khan Academy for auto-grading
- give feedback on written reflections - use Mote to give audio feedback to streamline that
- hang student work - you better not be doing this first!
“But I want to give the students my best…”
Think in these terms:
Give your students the best classroom experience you can in the time that you have devoted to creating those experiences.
In an effort to give your students your best, don’t give your family your leftovers.
Have fewer things to do in the first place
One of the ways I figured out how to have less tasks to do in the first place was to give my students jobs in the classroom that actually helped me out.
Click on the button below to get a list of 26 student jobs that I’ve used in my class, many of which actually came from tasks that I was doing myself before I made them into student jobs.
Let me know if you try them out!