MAINTAINING BOUNDARIES IS HARD
“I was that teacher who was here right when the building opened. I was here till five, just getting it done, feeling prepared. I think having my daughter made me say, ‘Okay, wait. Now, this one human being has to be the number one thing for me.' And I still do my work at night, but it's after she goes to bed and I limit myself to an amount of time. And if I can't get something done in a timely manner, and people are waiting on me, I express to them why. I've had to draw that hard line and it was very hard because I like to check off the boxes. I like to get everything done and then I can relax. But now I just give myself the grace of knowing that my job is never-ending. So I have to give myself an end time to put myself first, to put my husband first, and my child over something like that email. It can wait till the morning. I think that my daughter did that for me. 100%”
“Okay, so creating those boundaries, right? (…) Am I the best at it? No.”
“I feel like you have to look and find the positives in it. I might be up late, grading this test, but then—Oh, my gosh! My whole class got this right. Oh, wow! That lab worked! I think it's just the stress of it. It comes down to the need to serve. And I do that through science. So there’s definitely an unhealthy obsession with thinking of everything that could go wrong and preparing for it. But, when it comes down to it, for me the positives way outweigh everything.”
“And I do need that summer off to just recalibrate, you know.”
SUPPORT AT HOME
“I have a great husband and I think that makes all the difference (…) I remember having a conversation with my husband and he said, ‘If I had dated a teacher before you, it would have been a red flag today (…) because you bring it home.’ You know, I want to come home and I want to vent about it. So now it's almost a comedy routine. I'll come home and he's like, ‘Tell me the gossip. Get it off your chest.' (….) We have the ‘Wives Club,’ right? Where we're all teachers. And then the husbands all get together and complain about how it is to be married to a teacher.”
“My husband definitely picks up a lot of the slack during the school year, and then during the summer, I'm the one that kind of picks it up and helps more. Maybe while he's doing the dishes, I'm able to like get some grading done.”
“He's 100% of why I've been able to move up in my career because I have him at home, knowing that he is supportive. He picks our daughter up from daycare. I don't know when I can get out of school—If a kid stops by, I have a hard time saying, ‘Oh, no! I have to end this conversation because I want to go pick up my daughter', but I have to, you know. So he takes that stress off of me because he's willing to do that.”
COMMUNITY OF COLLEAGUES
“Most of us have been together for a very long time.”
“When I first started here, I had a mentor. You immediately get paired up with somebody, either in your department or somebody that is close to your age that's been here for a while. I think that they do a lot of trying to make sure people mesh, where you could make that connection.”
“All the girls in the department eat together. All the boys eat together. It's kind of like a high school of its own. The coaches, they have their own office they go to after school. We all have our own cliques within this bigger school. It's like a school within a school for the adults.”
“But definitely, community is huge because if I didn't have somebody here that I could go to when something erupts, it would be lonely and isolating.”