Managing Stressors to Avoid Burnout: Student Behavior & Cell Phones

STRESSOR: STUDENT BEHAVIOR

“I think a lot of people become teachers—especially the good ones and the idealistic ones, and the ones with the big dreams—because they want to help teenagers and they see school as this sort of nasty, oppressive institution and they kind of want to save the kids from it. All of which is fine and they're right. It is a nasty, oppressive institution, but we are the institution. I can't succeed at what I'm doing if I'm trying to just break it, if I'm trying to tear the institution apart because it's mean and nasty and I just want to be nice to the kids. Then I'm not going to succeed at giving them what school actually can give them (…) I'm not actually going to be an effective teacher because I'm not trying to teach them or not trying to do what teachers do, and I'll be super frustrated because I'm constantly at war with myself. What works for me is to say, ‘Okay, yeah—it's a nasty institution, but all of society would be worse off without it, and therefore I have the unfortunate job of being the person who confiscates 14 year-olds’ cell phones and gives them detention and fails them and makes them miserable in all kinds of ways. And it's pretty annoying and I would be happy not to have to do it. On the other hand, if no one were doing this job, all society would not work very well.”

“I teach higher level classes (…) which means that I have significantly fewer discipline issues because the kids with the serious discipline issues are usually not on [the higher] level.”

STRESSOR: STUDENTS’ CELL PHONES

“My school has a policy that I love and I wish we enforced more. There's a safe in each classroom and at the beginning of the day students have to put their cell phone in the safe, and it gets unlocked and given back to them at the end of the day. The homeroom teacher is in charge of this, collects them at the beginning of every day and returns them every afternoon. Because I'm an English teacher, I don't have a homeroom class, which is wonderful, so I don't have to deal with it.”

“Last year, because of the war, they made me a homeroom teacher because the homeroom teacher for the 10th grade was off in the reserves and I was sent to replace him, and I was terrible. The homeroom teacher in the Israeli education system is a really important job and you're supposed to have a really strong connection with the students and do all kinds of group building things, and I was terrible at it. But I was really good at those cell phones. I just made made it my job, because as a regular subject teacher I know the difference between teaching a lesson when the homeroom teacher dealt with the cell phones in the morning or when he didn't. I know that the lesson is so much better. I know, walking around the hallways, how much nicer it is to see the kids talking to each other and not just texting all day, or doing whatever it is they do on their phones. I fought super hard for those phones, and every morning started with going kid by kid and hearing all of the excuses about why they can't give me their phone this morning, or they forgot it at home, or they give me the other phone—they give me their fake phone and I have to figure out it's their fake phone. I knew every kid's cell phone in that class. It's a lot of work and it's really annoying because every day they have a new excuse and every day they're trying to avoid you in some other way—and that one's hiding, and that one intentionally comes late. On the other hand, you know that their day is so much better when you deal with it. Their day is going to be a thousand times better, even if you only get half the phones.”