By Michael Rosenberg, Teacher, Stratford School
There are few professions outside of teaching that can
empathize with the struggle of being an educator. As a teacher, our days in the
classroom can be a physical and mental roller coaster. Then at day’s end, stacks
of papers await our pen and stickers, and Bay Area traffic awaits our draining
commute home. Facing these issues, the recent addition of a child, and a move
far from my campus have increased my need to find balance. However, wrestling
with a reasonable balance of work and personal life has been a struggle for
most of my career.
Knowing that I had to restructure my life to fit my new
struggles, I decided to reevaluate my work and personal life balance. I began
this process by first mapping my day which included commute time to and from
work, prep-time, and hours spent at home. By experimenting with my commute to
work, I found that leaving fifteen minutes earlier allowed me to avoid most of
the traffic. This allowed me to get to work thirty minutes earlier. Then I
began to be more efficient with prep-times-grading as many papers as possible.
From that, I noticed that there were opportunities to cut back on some
excessive homework writing assignments. I shifted those into more creative
visuals that became more effective at reinforcing concepts and look better on
the walls. This sped up grading and marking papers, as the students were
retaining more and I was not as buried. Prioritizing was my next task, setting
a plan to tackling the more important/time sensitive tasks first. Finally, I
set a time limit. I work until a set time. Once that time is up, I go home, and
I take nothing with me.
Mapping my schedule, readjusting my commute, prioritizing,
and setting time limits has greatly improved my work/life balance. While it’s
not a perfect system, it has worked well this year for me.
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