Slice of Life #15: Emotional Labor: It’s a Thing.

It’s Thursday.

I come home, pull some leftovers out of the fridge, and plop down onto the couch.

It’s only 3:30, but I am exhausted. How can that be possible? I was only teaching!

Ah – there’s the rub.

Honestly, in my first year teaching, I used to think I was just weak, that maybe my exhaustion was my undisciplined college self responding negatively to a 9-to-5 job.

Now I know better: I’m tired not because of the physical labor I do throughout the day or due to my own laziness; I’m tired because of the emotional labor I engage in every second I’m in the school building.

I recently came across a post about emotional labor, and the descriptor that stuck out to me most was “always expected to be emotionally and mentally available”.

This is exactly how I feel after a day of teaching, even if it’s a “good day.”

Teaching is an emotionally and mentally draining job. Delivering nuanced content, managing classroom culture and behaviors, being kind and supportive to over 100 individuals; that’s a lot.

And some days, being able to reflect on all I accomplish in one day can make me feel invincible. Exhausted in a satisfied, sated way. But also, always, still… tired.

Maybe I’m only complaining because I’m an introvert? Because sometimes I feel I get annoyed by too much talking and distractions, and it just compounds as the day goes on.

Example:

I teach 6th grade, and while, logically, I know self-control is literally not developed in my students’ growing brains yet, I get so tired of reminding them what active listening should look like.

By 6th period, my last class of the day, I’m short tempered, and usually lower on emotional support, too. My “wait time”, allowing students to check themselves and their classmates on distracting behaviors before I begin my screeching, is replaced by “iPad! On my desk! Bring it up!”

This is especially true for days like today: Read Aloud days. No downtime to slip into a book for 5 minutes and calm my mind before checking in on students. No moment alone at my desk to take attendance. Just leading a class for 42 minutes, with short bursts of turn-and talks and notebook page exemplar creation. And lots of large group conversation to manage.

On these days, I lose my place in the read aloud book more easily with 6th period. And I find my place less quickly. The students get less fluent narration from me, and I feel bad. (Luckily they do get better lessons, being my 5th time teaching the same thing each day.)

But I also get more frustrated with them. I have given them ALL my standard mini-lectures: “you know what you should be doing, why aren’t you doing it” and “I’m not a wicked witch who makes you get off your iPad for no reason” , “I’m a human too and you gotta treat me like one when I’m talking to you” and “can’t you please just remind each other what you should be doing so I don’t have to stop the class for this shit?”: First through third periods hardly ever get those.

As I open up my “tech abuse” spreadsheet, I notice it’s filled with 5th and 6th period names – not a single morning student to be found.

Another argument for this could be class sizes, of course: these are 28 and 26 students large, and I have one of the smallest rooms in the school. When you can’t move chatty kids away from each other, there are issues.

But I think it mostly comes from my depleting emotional labor reserves. Finally having a specific term to describe this feeling, EMOTIONAL LABOR, has made me feel validated.

Seen.

But now I’m wondering: do other teachers feel this way, too? I’m especially interested by you extroverts out there. In any case, feel free to commiserate in comments 🙂