The Emotional Exhaustion of Teaching

We have said it before and we will say it again: good teaching does not involve rewards. Rewarding good behavior and punishing negative behaviors is not an effective way to get a class of students invested in learning. What does work? Building relationships.

If you are like me, you may have recently seen a Twitter thread that struck a chord by author Alex Shervin Vernet. The author of Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education shared some thoughts that resonated so deeply with me. 

Building relationships and maintaining those relationships with 90+ students is exhausting work. It is both emotionally and physically exhausting and, unfortunately, not enough is being said about how much effort and work goes into how we build and maintain those relationships. We are not acting. If we were, we would all be delivering some Oscar level performances…and y’all - we definitely are not paid enough to be acting that well. 

Students come to school with trauma, some students are traumatized by school. When students trust their teachers and trust them enough to unload that trauma, phew, it can be a lot to take. Each year our students come with more trauma to unpack. Our world can be a traumatizing place. Each year, the burden is laid at our feet to help unpack that trauma and to help carry the weight of that trauma, which many of us do, because we love our students and we know that they learn best when they know we care about them. However, this burden…it’s a lot. 

So what do we do about it? How do we find balance? I don’t have the answers, but I do know that this is just one more thing we can add to the list of why teaching in this day and age is so darn hard.