In American education, we are extremely good when it comes to time management. We plan our schedules months and years in advance. Days are mapped out down to the minute. Which is great, it makes our schools efficient and passes on organizational skills to students. But those gains come at a sacrifice in energy management that isn’t worth it. Our schools are terrible at managing the energy of everyone involved in the system. We’re worse for it, because the creativity and problem solving it takes for teachers to be good at their jobs, and for students to create meaningful work, require energy. A lot of it.
Why do we not take more breaks? Why do we not manage our energy better?....according to Seinfeld, because we’re stupid, Watch that link from the start time to the 34:20 mark. It’s 7 minutes, but it’s worth it. The interview is about transcendental meditation, but feel free to ignore all that and focus on the message of energy management.
My favorite part in that is the story about his daughter, because that is all of us in education. We go from bell, to bell, to bell, to bell, to lunch. At lunch, many of us work. Even worse, some of us don’t even take a lunch. Even worse than this, SOME OF US THINK NOT TAKING A LUNCH BREAK IS NORMAL AND ACCEPTABLE. THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOR! TAKE A BREAK! THIS IS UNHEALTHY!......but we don’t. Maybe we get our one prep period, then it’s on to the bell, to bell, to bell, to bell. Then we’re done. But many of us aren't. Many of us immediately change clothes and go run and jump and yell and blow whistles. If you’re an admin, you have meetings or stay to supervise the basketball game or etc. etc. etc. so that, by the time we get home, we are so wiped that we have no energy for anything but eating, taking care of kids if we have them, mindlessly scrolling, then sleep. Rarely is there energy left to brainstorm new, innovative ideas for our classroom, let alone enough time to make those ideas a reality. Why do we do this? Because we’re stupid. But there’s more.
We set up our schools this way because of financial demands & schedule issues. Of course every administrator would love to give their teachers more prep and break times; they’re not stupid. They would also like to give themselves more prep time. Administrators feel the pain more than teachers. Every problem in the building, in one way or another, is their problem. That’s exhausting. They just don’t have the hours in the day, in the way we currently do things, to make more prep time happen. If we’re going to offer a suitable amount of courses to fill a student’s schedule, adequately prepare them in all fields, and keep them engaged within an 8 hour school day….we have to get to work. We have to take advantage of every possible minute. So if we wanted to give teachers 2, 3, 4 prep periods a day, we would have to add staff members with money that we don’t have or offer less classes, both of which are nonstarters. We just don’t have the time, the money, or the resources….or so the story goes…. to structure schools to be better at energy management.
This isn’t just a teacher problem either. By 6th, 7th, and 8th period, my students are shot. Teaching a class of 7th graders at 3:00 in the afternoon after they’ve been in class all day is often an exercise in futility. 3 o’clock becomes a twilight zone of tapping pencils and blank stares. The sound & look of the room makes you feel their inability to focus. It reminds me of a civil war quote on the ineffectual George McClellan, infamous for his unwillingness to attack the Confederacy & constant desire for more soldiers. An exasperated Abraham Lincoln said that “sending soldiers to that army is like shoveling fleas across a barnyard”. Trying to teach junior high students at 3 in the afternoon about World History often feels like shoveling fleas across a barnyard.
It's all just unproductive exhaustion. Teachers & students need energy and time to be creative, to problem solve, to think about new ways of doing things, to address individual needs. Our current style of time management is the death of energy management, along with the creativity and problem solving necessary to be great at what we do (not to mention the burnout it can lead to in many teachers, especially new ones). It doesn’t have to be this way.
At this point, many will step back and say “well, that’s why we get summer." This is completely nonsensical. What the heck does me having time off in June have to do with my energy level on a cold Thursday in February when I’ve already got a solid 55 hours invested in the week, another day to go before the weekend, and I’ve barely seen sunlight in 2 months? We are not wired this way. We can’t take two months off in the summer and stay charged all year. Energy management is a constant process, not an Iphone.
This, too, is where we go down a rabbit hole of educational philosophy that says, “well, if you show up at 8 and roll out at 4, that means you’re a bad teacher”. You hear this all the time. It is common thought in education that if you put in a full days work according to your contract, you are lazy and probably a bad teacher. I had college professors rail to my classes about how “we millennials want to show up, do our work, and head home”....and we millennials looked back in confusion and said, “Wait, didn’t you just describe what a job is?” It has become the expectation that you can’t do your job well in the hours provided to you as a teacher and a student, and that is broken thinking.
The problem with the 8-to-4 generalization is that it’s often true. It's often the case that teachers who roll in with the morning bell & out with the teacher bell at 4 are (often, but not always) lazy, burnt out, or not that good at their job. This is because, in order to be good at your job in education, you have to put in those extra hours after school because we don't structure them into our days. Those hours need to be included in the school day.
It's a bummer that we shame teachers if they're unwilling to stay after their contracted hours. That we do speaks to the ‘martyr syndrome’ that so many teachers take on: The logic that says “If you’re not making yourself a martyr for the cause, you’re not doing it right.” It’s a common thought process in education that is wrapped up in how much money we make, how society views us, etc, etc. That's beyond our scope here. We say things like “If you’re not putting in that extra time, you just aren’t passionate enough.” That's broken thinking; the result of a flawed system that doesn't work enough energy into our days
If you’re an experienced teacher, you may be thinking to yourself: "Well, you don’t understand education. This is how it works." I would ask you to reflect on that statement. I understand this is how it’s done. It’s how I do it. I’m saying this is not how it should be done. Because I desperately want to roll in at 8 and leave at 4 with energy to do things I care about when I get home….but I often can’t if I want to be a good teacher. So I'll work within our system, but I won't accept that this is how it should be. Education is the never finished pyramid that is only complete by striving to complete it. Stepping back and saying “this is the way it is” is the death of innovation…..and the personal lives of first year teachers.
This problem of time & energy management weighs most heavily on new teachers. I would guess it is the most important reason why we have so many teachers leaving within the first 5 years of their career. Part of what was so frustrating about my first year teaching was that, even when I felt I had an idea that would allow me to do awesome things in the classroom, I didn’t have the time or energy to make that idea a reality. A killer lesson in Geography was watered down due to the time it took to prepare the World History, Nebraska History, and Psychology lessons for the day in the one hour I had during the day to do that. It was like the system itself wasn’t allowing me to be good. Don’t get me wrong, most of the reasons I wasn’t good my first year were my fault, but there were a lot of frustrating instances where it felt like I couldn’t be good...unless I wanted to work from 6 am to 7 pm and sacrifice my Saturdays in addition to my Sundays, thereby decreasing the quality of….well, everything in my life.
When I think about all the times I have been inspired with a new, creative idea that really engaged my kids, rarely was it during the school day whilst sprinting from bell to bell. It was at home, in the shower, relaxing with warm water blasting my head. It was at NETA, where I could pursue what sessions were interesting and had time to sit and talk with engaging and passionate people during a school day (everyone that goes to NETA talks about how re-energizing it is forgetting the most basic reason: They’re not at work!). It was at my tech cadre program at ESU3 in Nebraska, where I got the day off to sit and learn about new tech, how to use it in the classroom, and then had time to create and prep it for school. The best things I did in my classroom last year were my personally built digital breakouts. I would not have done those without the time and energy I got from the experiences listed above. We need to find a way to make these moments a regular part of our school days, not anomalies that we occasionally enjoy if we’re lucky enough to have an administrator willing to support our participation. I’m lucky, I have those administrators. Many don’t.
What’s the solution? Here’s a simple one that people will laugh at, but I’m serious: Nap time. Or at least some down time during the day, if only for 30 minutes. It is a no brainer. Teachers and students could choose to prep or nap. This is common practice in the education systems of many countries, most notably in most of Latin America, Japan, and China. In China, our kids got two hours for lunch and nap time. That meant that the kids and I actually started our classes after lunch with more energy than in the morning, not less. At the end of the day in China, I felt fine. I was not wiped. My final period classes were some of my most effective. I had time and energy to engage with kids after class, as when they asked me to eat with them in the cafeteria to practice English. Not only that, I had the energy to do the things that I like at the end of the day. I had the energy to READ DURING THE SCHOOL YEAR….FOR FUN! I studied mandarin and learned guitar! Rarely can I say that here, where afternoon classes tend more towards shoveling fleas across a barnyard.
We could propose more radical solutions. How about larger class sizes that use technology to shrink things? We could teach core classes, like Algebra, in one giant room with all the algebra teachers and students. That way, we don’t need to have 13 different sections of algebra. That would open up some time, I would think, for rest and prep...and hopefully creativity and problem solving and cross curricular lessons and, you know, physical and emotional well being.
How about we get rid of the Iphone-battery logic of summer and go year round? We could take 1 or 2 week long breaks throughout the year, maybe after each quarter. That seems like a much more sensical approach than LET’s SPRINT FOR 10 MONTHS…..THEN DO NOTHING FOR 2 & ½ ! Heck, we could even keep the same amount of days and instructional minutes mandated by the state or teacher contracts, just spread them out over the course of a full year.
These are tough ideas to implement, but it doesn’t even need to be this radical. How about just nap time? (in Seinfeld Voice): Is nap time really that radical of a suggestion? How has a NAP become radical!?
We’ve got to find a way to rework the current practical demands of our schools so that we can better manage energy, even if that means fighting the resistance that will inevitably come from our culture. We live in a United States where “busy” is to most common adjective people use to describe themselves. It's who we are, but it’s not healthy. If only there were a giant social institution that Americans could change to address this problem in our culture…..
It’s not healthy to not eat lunch. It’s not healthy to work 10 to 12 hour days at the cost of personal relationships or health and well being. It’s not healthy to bash people for following their contract. It’s not okay that almost 20% of teachers leave the field within the first five years of teaching. And, frankly, it’s stupid that we ignore steps to manage energy in schools. Taking a break is not lazy. Showing up at 8 and leaving at 4 while still being able to be a great teacher should be the standard (extracurriculars are another story). We have to manage the energy of teachers and students better to improve our creativity, problem solving, and (my god, almost as an afterthought!) our health and well being! Anyway, what do you think? I defer to Jerry.
NOTE: This was originally written in 2018 while working as a junior high social studies teacher at Milford Public Schools
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