A long look at burnout

Burnout is a relatively new term. I can't be too sure, but I think it may have orginated "as a term" when Dick Vermeil resigned as the Philadelphia Eagles coach in the early 1980s. Vermeil returned later and ended up winning a Superbowl with the Chiefs. When he resigned he was still a very young man and no one could really explain why. Naturally, burnout has occured before and in a lot less famous circles.

Every burnout is different, but they all end up the same. About half of the teachers that enter the profession end up leaving before their fifth year. You talk about a short life expectancy. Things in education have always affected me deeply, but I always found a way to press on somehow. Usually, it was by changing assignments or campuses to give myself the allusion of a new challenge. However, I have found the same issues have bothered me every step of the way.

Unfortunately, at some point that becomes impossible. You hope it's when you have about thirty years (or more) in when you start becoming a member of the mistletoe club. This is where you walk around and wear mistletoe in your back pocket. For others of us it happens sooner. For me, it has been coming on for quite awhile. It has caused me to get a lot more jaded and apathetic when it comes to going above and beyond. Suddenly, an average job performance evaluation just doesn't hurt that much.

Last week I angered a lot of people with my discussion of welfare. Hopefully, we can discuss poverty at some point in the future. I realized as I took a step back that things were angering me that used to be irritations. I might go on a five minute rant about lack of parental involvement and then get back into the game. Now, those rants are becoming multiple day rants. I'm quicker to lose my temper than I used to be. What's more sad is that I see the same behavior from some of my colleagues. At any rate, I use this forum to apologize to those I offended in my last series of blogs. I tend to be more conservative than most around here on welfare, but there is more conservative and then there Lt. Gov. Bauer. I suppose we should leave it at that.

The funny thing is that there are some points of anger that have turned to apathy. We have a young PE teacher here that reminds me of me when I was younger. He volunteers for everything, interjects his opinions at faculty meetings, and gets geniunely angry when the system doesn't work the way we know it should. I wish I could be that passionate again. Too many things have happened along the way to make that happen. If you want to find out more details you gotta read the book. It isn't so much that it is my story that makes it a good read. I wish I could be that narcissistic. It's that it tells the story of so many teachers that have succomb to burnout.

I know educators will burn me at the stake for saying this, but I think most of us are compensated fairly well for what we do. The state funding system dictates that some districts do not pay their teachers enough, but I have never felt that way anywhere I worked. When you consider the two months we get off and all of the holidays we get, it's a pretty good paying job. I have never known a teacher that left over money. They left because they were tired of taking on all of the issues that go with teaching. The problem is also not the kids. A lot of people fall into the caricature of the old man shaking his fist from his lawn chair. Teachers aren't those people.

Of course, teachers complain about lack of discipline, but that doesn't fall on the kid. That falls on the parents, administrators, and school board. If those people do the right then then kids do the right thing. Most kids do the right thing in spite of those groups. So, if it isn't money and it isn't the kids then who is it? Well, it becomes about the rest of the groups with a healthy dose of government not know how. This isn't a Republican or Democratic issue. Both parties are responsible for the decay of our schools. They are responsible because education seems to be one of the few points where no one bothers to ask anyone that is actually in a classroom. Ask a teacher and they will tell you what needs to be done.

So, my choice at the end of the year is to change campuses and therefore accept a new challenge or to take on a new profession. I have some options there that I won't articulate at the moment. For the moment, sometimes I have to pinch myself to make sure I can still feel pain and to laugh to make sure I still can do that too. Otherwise, I seem to be pressing the snooze button more often and that just isn't a good sign.