Back to school: How teachers can ease their stress
If you want to learn about stress, ask a teacher.
"I didn't have high blood pressure or anxiety until I started teaching," Dallas teacher Sheridan Dixon said. But within a few years of beginning a new career as an elementary school teacher in her 40s, she was having panic attacks, and her blood pressure spiked so high that she ended up in an emergency room.
Dixon blames stress. Having worked previously as a special education aide, she was used to classrooms. But her students that first year were tough, she said, and "my body responds to stress by having anxiety attacks."
The demands were overwhelming. "You teach all day long," she said, with perhaps 45 minutes allotted for "plans, copies, papers, reports, meetings, conferences" – everything she needed to do to keep her classroom functioning. How will I get this done, she wondered, without working nights and weekends or buying a copier?
Understanding those and other stresses of teaching can be easy. Dealing with it might be harder, but experts say teachers, administrators and parents all can help.
Any job can be stressful, said Dr. Chris McCarthy, a psychologist in the department of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he leads the Coping and Stress in Education Lab. Service professions, including teaching, add the burden of having to be constantly "on" for other people.
Teachers deal with additional factors, he said. They are in charge of large groups of young people, sometimes in schools that lack resources. Many are financially stressed. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic upended the education world, and teachers have found themselves in political and cultural crosshairs as...