Teachers are burned out.

A lot of my friends are teachers, especially on social media. It feels like every girl I was friends with in middle school has a classroom now and I can see their updates on Facebook. A lot of us are stressed out to a level we could’ve never predicted three years ago, but medicine and education have been hit the hardest.

If you’re a teacher and you’re frustrated or burned out, remember that you’re not alone. I don’t know that it will relieve any of the stress, but it sometimes helps to know that other people feel the same way that you do, and that you are not somehow inadequate or bad at your job because the strain is getting to you.

According to the 2021 State of the U.S. Teacher Survey conducted by the RAND Corporation, job-related stress, burnout and symptoms of depression seem to be almost universal among teachers. Of those surveyed, one in five said they weren’t coping well with job stress, one in four said they were experiencing symptoms of depression and half felt burnt out.

(cont. GMA)

I wanted to show y’all a conversation I saw on Twitter this morning between two teachers. One is a new teacher (year 4) who has yet to settle herself into the profession because two of those years have been spent coping with teaching in a pandemic. The other is a 15 year veteran of the NYC school system. I thought this was insightful from both sides, so maybe you will too.

I’d like to say something peppy and inspirational here like, We’re all in this together! but I don’t like to be lying all on the internet like that. If we were all in this together, teachers would be better paid and better supported in their jobs. The government wouldn’t constantly look for ways to cut education budgets and officials at the district and state level would take more care to recognize what teachers experience in the actual classroom. So no, we’re not all in this together, but there is a robust community of other teachers that you can reach out to! Lean on each other and try to remember you have the most important job in the world — it’s okay to be stressed out by it.