Yesterday’s ELTchat about teacher burnout got me thinking about a post I’ve had upstairs in the attic for quite a while.

Burnout is something every teacher will continually confront – even those of us with the best of jobs. Entropy is a law that applies to teaching as well as physics. Nor, is there a sure fire, one size fits all solution. Some teachers will have to just push through it. Others need to change things up a little. Some, change things up a lot and maybe head off in new directions. Some teachers will even get motivated by digging deeper and pushing hard (yes, it is true!). Some teachers will just need to step back and take a break.

That’s what I am doing this year. It is hard without my own classroom (though I’m teaching online). I miss the contact, miss the involvement. Miss my nice big office and the starbucks 20m away! Still, I needed it and needed a new challenge. This year, really trying to do different things, start up and be independent. I work from home, have my new office finally set up. Doing some consulting for a few companies (most notably EnglishCentral) that I believe in (and I’ll only support companies with vision and that have the teacher’s interest in mind). Will be starting my own School of TEFL. I’m near my family that I love and am now officially back from self imposed TESOL exile.

This is how I’ve always dealt with teacher burnout – by stepping back. As the French put it, “reculez pour mieux sauter”. Stepping back so to jump further forward.

It is a principle we all have to learn to obey. When to push, when to step back. As an athlete, my job wasn’t only training well – it was also perfecting the art of doing nothing. Only with rest, does growth come. I am also thinking now about long jumpers – how they step back, rock back and forth as they look down the runway before leaping so far far ahead….

My stepping back involves getting in touch with my self. Teaching takes so much selflessness and pulls you so much away from yourself – you need this, all teachers need this. For me, stepping back towards myself involves renewing old habits. Like reading and poetry. Like running. Like making materials for teachers.

I returned to my old karaoke making today – inspired by a song I love and used to spend hours running the streets to. U2 – running to stand still. Perfect for your students and also you – many of you who might be “running to stand still”.

If you liked this – you probably will enjoy “The unbearable lightness of being an EFL teacher.”

Now back in Canada – I’m getting some time to just sit with a book and ponder. Mostly because it has now been one week of wicked weather – snow blinding and the banks are so high, you don’t know where the yard ends and the house begins.

One benefit to this has been revisiting my “children”, my books. Today, I picked up Thomas Merton’s “The Way of Chuang Tze” and thought about the tao while I loosened my bowels in a nice warm washroom. His famous story of the 5 enemies.

I’ll quote it verbatim – it is so insightful. (and has some application to my previous blog post about – “bad teachers”. But at the end, I’ll apply the 5 enemies to education/teaching. As a way of showing the ways we have the wool pulled over our eyes and off our backs as we are fleeced so innocently.

The 5 Enemies (I believe the copy right has lapsed, so I’m safe )

With wood from a hundred year old tree

they make sacrificial vessels

covered with green and yellow designs.

The wood that was cut away

Lies unused in the ditch.

If we compare the sacrificial vessels with the wood in the ditch

we find them to differ in appearance:

One is more beautiful than the other.

Yet, they are equal in this: both have lost their original nature (my italics).

So if you compare the robber and the respectable citizen

you find that one is, indeed, more respectable than the other:

Yet they agree in this: they have both lost

the original simplicity of man.

How did they lose it? Here are the 5 ways.

Love of colors bewilders the eye and it fails to see right.

– think of how teachers use the latest gadgets. Think of the trash heaps of over priced technology. The dazzle of the next technique. Think of how we as teachers forget the core message and objectives and instead reach for the glittter and show. Think of how so much schooling is about keeping up appearances and grades and not focusing on the important stuff of character and right livelihood.

Love of harmonies bewitches the ear and it loses its true hearing.

– Do we listen to our students, to their needs? Do we get overwhelmed by the messages of those above, so sweet they are to our ear. No child left behind, student’s first, teach every child, progress, differentiation, standardization. Don’t we march to the pied pipers tune? Do we try to do too much and thus, end up doing very little? Are we deaf from all the pronouncements of a “crisis in education”. Why can’t we listen to that child inside us?

Love of perfumes fills the head with dizziness

– How often do we make decisions for our career and job and not our students. How often are we filled with authority and power when we know this is a moat that keeps student’s out of the castle of learning? How often do we “play” the part of a teacher, loving ourselves for ourselves while the whole rat race marches towards Gomorrah?

Love of flavors ruins the taste.

– It is so easy to just keep doing what you are good at, isn’t it? So comfortable. But what about the taste of the classroom – hasn’t it gone stale? Why aren’t we listening and refusing that flavor?

We love it when our class is working fine, each day finished on time and all is well. But what of the flavor?

Desires unsettle the heart until the original nature runs amok.

– When was the last time you laughed and played with your students. Rolled on the carpet with them? What has become of our initial spirit that was there that first week as a teacher? How has our desire got in the way – when will we as a teacher, let go? Let go and just learn instead of prepare to learn.

These five are the enemy of true life.

Yet, these are what “men of discernment” claim to live for.

They are not what I live for:

If this is life, then pigeons in a cage

have found happiness!

Chuang Tze

Teaching effects eternity. It really does.

Our lives effect eternity but not near as perfectly and precisely, not near as powerfully nor presciently as teaching.

I’ve been thinking lately about my own effect – how I stumbled along and began EFL Classroom about 6 years ago just posting up a few resources and thoughts on a free website I built - the BATCAVE. And since then, like a Rube Goldberg machine (try this example too and maybe get students describing ), one thing led to another. One thing had an effect that nobody could really predict but somehow through all those effects, one BIG EFFECT did happen. A thread ran through all the  pushes, pulls and dispersion of energies.

It’s amazing how in our classrooms, just like EFL Classroom – this same thing occurs. And you never know what you do or what you say – how it will effect eternity and keep that thread threading……

As students, we also have been effected by teachers. I remember a cold autumn evening, like tonight, many years ago. Just a few months into being 16. Hitchiking home to the farm after X-country practice. Hitch hiking home under a dim street light along a highway that led into black. Out of nowhere came a runner, my French teacher Lionel Desjardins. He stopped and asked me what was up. He could have just waved and kept running but he stopped. We talked or rather, he talked and I nodded.  I won’t reveal our conversation, it remains private but just that he cared, made a difference. He set things in motion, in a way that led to this, to that and to where I am……

We are so blessed as teachers, to weave such fabric. Almost godlike, we touch the future and keep alight something which we are still searching a name for….

I don’t know what it is but I do know we are a Rube Goldberg machine that gets us there as we butterfly along. Let’s keep touching eternity and keeping the world on its axis. My hats off to all those teachers that daily make this miraculous thing happen.

To end or rather abandon this post – here are 2 of my fav. Rube Goldberg videos.

Find more videos like this on EFL CLASSROOM 2.0