Over the past several years in the educational realm, educators at all levels have started to talk about the need for taking care of their mental health. Mental health is an important aspect of every professional, especially in education because it is a hard job. One way that educators can be proactive in taking care of their mental health is to setup reasonable boundaries for when they work, respond to emails or take work home. This helps to build in balance between work and personal life, but also to setup reasonable expectations for the job that parents and administrator can and should adhere to.
One of the first boundaries that I like to setup is what work that I take home, I prefer to take as little work home as possible so that when I am at home I can be spending time with my family and not doing school work. I am an early riser, even on the weekends, so I allow myself to work on school when the rest of my family is still sleeping on Saturday morning. I use the 7am to 9am as my time to work on school work during the year. This may be grading papers or writing lesson plans for the upcoming or building out a new lesson/assignment that will be needed. Now this type of boundary will vary from person to person and you will have to make your own determination for this. But once I have set the boundary, the hard part is sticking to it, it is very easy to push outside of the boundaries and then they become useless. I am very careful about maintaining this schedule based boundary to build balance between my work and home life. There are a few times, where I have to work outside of this time due to a pressing matter, but this is when we each have to weight the cost and versus the need or reward. Next I will setup boundaries around communication, in our building we have had conversations around this topic already and have a twenty-four hour response time for emails. This has worked out well, because in the evening I simply have my work notifications turn off at 4pm, I have additionally put in my syllabus that I do not respond to student or parent emails after this time as well. My administration has begun using a Remind101 message to communicate when teachers need to check their emails for an emergency communication which I do leave active all the time, however we get these very sparingly, maybe once or twice a school year. Finally, the last area that I like to setup a boundary is with more of a logistical boundary, I hate having to deal with papers and projects. So over the past year, I have been moving to a paperless method of assignment and project submission. This is something not everyone maybe able to achieve, but I decided that it was something that was important to me. I begin this process by moving all of my assignments into a digital format (which was a lot of front end work), this really was completing work that I had started during the COVID teaching period. I also adjusted my views on cellphones in the classroom and now teach my student rules and etiquette for using them in class. As I am a shop teacher, they can use their phones to document project work in the lab and classroom. This has allowed me to go fully digital with my entire grading processes including the give student grades and feedback on their assignments. I am also able to synchronize all this information over to our district’s grade-book making it more accessible for students and parents.
I believe that in order to build a healthier work life balance, we as teachers have to be looking out for out mental well-being, since frankly no one else is going to be doing. We have be willing to the risks to re-evaluate the process that we use and be willing to change these processes to promote better mental health in our individual jobs and the profession overall. We do not have to be connected to work 24/7, there will always be tomorrow; problems will still be around to tackle tomorrow, parent emails will still be there tomorrow. Taking time to attend a child’s sporting event or cooking a homemade meal for the family or going out with our spouse will always be much more important in my opinion than checking papers or being consistently stressed by the ding of our work email going off. We need to make it the norm to disconnect and walk away from the job when the work day is done.