Teacher stress

STUDIES

In a survey of British head teachers 40% of respondents reported having visited their doctor with stress-related problems in the previous year: 20% considered that they drank too much; 15% believed they were alcoholics; 25% suffered from serious stress-related health problems in­cluding hypertension, insomnia, depression and gas­trointestinal disorders.

(National Association of Head Teachers, 2000)

Many teaching vacancies (37% in secondary and 19% in primary schools) were due to ill health as compared to 9% of nursing vacancies and 5% in the banking and pharmaceutical industries.

(Study by the Times Educational Supplement, 1997)

When 800 teachers in England and France were sur­veyed about stress the responses were surprisingly dif­ferent: 22% of sick leave in England, as opposed to 1% in France was attributed to stress, and 55% of the En­glish teachers as opposed to 20% of the French sample reported recently considering leaving teaching. Still, the two national samples agreed as to the sources of pres­sure: classroom discipline, low social status and lack of parental support. The English teachers reported, however, more problems with long hours, overwork and po­litical interference.

(Travers & Cooper, 1997)

Overwork and role overload (coping with a number of competing roles within one's job) were also studied as stress factors for teachers. Stress and role overload were linked in a study of 322 Australian and Scottish lecturers (Pithers & Soden, 1998) and an assessment of 142 teach­ers by self-report revealed that recovery from stress oc­curred each weekend during the spring term, but by the end of the longer autumn term, weekend recovery no longer took place.

(Lewis, 1999)

A study of 1000 student teachers identified their greatest source of stress was evaluation apprehension and their second source of anxiety was classroom management. Of all the reported stressors, only classroom management did not decline following teacher practice.

(Morton, et al, 1997)

When 41 teachers were asked to identify what they must do to be a good teacher, 92% of the responses were couched in absolute terms, such as “must”, “need”, etc. These self-defeating, idealistic beliefs are significantly associated with high levels of stress.

(Chorhey,1998)

By Erin Bouma

TEACHING AND STRESS

If there was a personal masseuse stationed at every school, and I had a Jacuzzi in my classroom, I could take the stress of being a teacher easily in stride. But there is no whirlpool to whirl away my troubles and no massage salon in the teachers' lounge. So what to do?

We know what stress is. We live daily with the mental and physical tension of trying to discern when to go back to basics and when to embrace a brave new world, figuring out how to use the new software without losing everything on the disk, deciding if it's worth it to stand in line at the grocery or if there isn't something in the pantry we can fix for dinner. As teachers we have additional stresses. Teaching is a stressful job; there's no surprise at the fact that according to a Newsweek article, (6/4/01) 20% percent of new teachers leave in three years and by the fifth year, one third of them have left the profession.

What makes teaching difficult?

Aphrodite Matsakis, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Uni­versity of Maryland said, "The hardest part is reaching stu­dents who are at different levels of interest and background - and all at the same time!"

"I find disciplining the most challenging part of my job. Trying to regulate fifteen or twenty different personalities and still get some instruction in has always been tricky for me."

"Stress and teaching - is there any difference?" said Dr. Aphrodite Matsakis. Too often there isn't. But the stress doesn't stop at the classroom door. I spent years working in central administration where the endless demands for more paper­work and the office politics all created pressure and resent­ment.

Parker J. Palmer, Ph.D., author of The Courage to Teach, invites teachers to look beyond the nasty principal, the diffi­cult children or the mounds of paperwork as the cause of stress. 'The stress comes from us being out of alignment with our own lives," he stated. But by delving deeply inside to re-align one's self with one's genuine nature and truest values, he be­lieves we can achieve serenity and attain sanity.

The key to sanity for me was through journaling. Journaling is not just for aspiring writers and keeping a diary is not only for adolescents in love. On the job, when I couldn't express my frustration outright, writing down my thoughts was a big stress reliever.

In addition to journaling, there are other tools you can add to your teacher survival kit. Some easy and practical stress soothers include:

1) Breathing deeply - It sounds simple, and it is. But because breathing deeply is simple, that doesn't mean it isn't also profound. It is no mistake that the word 'inspire' derives from ‘inspiratio’ which means 'to breathe into'. Breathing deeply helps toconnect with that which gives us life, that which can give us inspiration. It helps us to draw in that divine influence that can help us cope with a situation.

2) Quiet time - a best selling author once commented that he performedbetter when he regularly scheduled rest breaks for himself. However, when he would tell people that he needed time alone to rest, they would often interrupt him anyway. As a result, he decided to tell others he needed time alone to pray. Then they almost always honored his request. However you have to do it, make sure you schedule in some personal down time.

3) Creativity - I'm a big believer in the ability of art to save the soul. Whether one is enjoying the fruit of someone else's creativity (good) or expressing one's own creativity (even better), the experience of the creative is rejuvenating to the spirit. I think of Carolina Maria de Jesus who lived in extreme poverty in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She fed herself and her children by salvaging scraps of food she found in the garbage. To distract herself from the daily stress of her dismal existence, she wrote in a journal. That journal evolved into a book entitled, Beyond All Pity, published in 1960 which immediately became a bestseller. Carolina Maria de Jesus's formal education had only taken her to the second grade. But her imagination took her to the peak.

Stress can't be eliminated from anyone's life. After all, stress is even a part of good things - getting married, having a baby, starting a new job, and holiday celebrations. To try to live without stress is to live without truly living. Therefore, we must strive to find peacekeeping and creative ways to approach stress, which means we will be able to live lives that are peaceful and creative.

Although, a masseuse assigned to every school wouldn't be a bad idea, either.

RECAPTURING THE COURAGE TO TEACH:

AN INTERVIEW WITH PARKER J. PALMER

With piles and piles of papers to grade, a crop of students who could win the Olympics for bad behavior, and when comments by parents, administrators and the press all seem to regard the profession with no respect, it may be hard to remember why you ever chose to teach.

Not to despair. Parker J. Palmer, Ph.D., specializes in helping educators nurture their inner teacher. Palmer is a former university professor and the founder of the Center for Teacher Formation. "We have created a national program which is now at work in twenty-five cities", he explained. "Groups of twenty-five K-12 teachers meet for eight weekend workshops over a two year period. They work exclusively on the 'inner Me' of the teacher, in community", Palmer said. "That means that our focus is not on developing curriculum, changing the bureaucracy, or advocating for better pay." The program is designed to help teachers gain what Palmer calls vocational renewal - the rejuvenation of the spirit and the heart to teach. "These are people who went into the profession with a very deep sense of calling", said Palmer. "But over the years, the abusive conditions that teachers have to work under causes a lot of that passion to get lost. The participants in the Teacher Formation project go on a deep and searching jour­ney to recover that passion."

In all his work and his words, Palmer's respect - no reverence - for the teaching profession is evident. "Teachers are our culture heroes", he stated. "They're the people who are asked to solve all the problems that society can't solve and are beaten up for their supposed inadequacies." This teacher of teachers has always had a fascination with the teaching-learning process and has helped guide the careers of hundreds of educators at every level from kindergarten through post-graduate study. He has also mentored others as part of his role as a teacher. "I think that mentoring is a very remarkable relationship which has two qualities to it", he said. "The first is unconditional love. This is a relationship where the student or mentee feels totally accepted as he is." Palmer goes on to describe the other quality, which could seem contradictory to the first: "There is a charged expectancy that the student will grow. This growth is not a demand that the student change, but an invitation to stretch. When you're in this space, when you're held this way by the mentor, you really want to grow", said Palmer. "You become more fully who you are."

/ by Joy Jones

from English, №25-26, 2003/

Set Work

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