If you are a burnout educator, then the following should be a good summary of you and your daily experience:
- 24 hours are never enough: preparing lessons, designing and grading assignments, setting exams, plus the administrative work (all multiplied by the factor of the number of students and classes)… don’t even mention social life
- Heart of gold, but a body of rust: you are always wishing to do more for your students, but the body just can’t keep up
- Mentally and physically drained: your eyebags are just as heavy as the ones you use to lug the markings home. Gastric issues due to missed meals. Plus, the psychological weight of being accountable to hundreds of students each day (we haven’t even include the parents).
Simply put, there is just not enough YOU to go around.
As such, how can you maximise each unit of effort to result in the greatest impact — on learners, other educators and your most neglected SELF? Read on!
1. Do not create from scratch
As educators, we are motivated by our desire to give the BEST to our students. As such, we often conceptualise an ideal approach to deliver the lesson. This causes us to believe that we MUST create slides in certain ways, choose each word that we use carefully or find that perfect diagram that illustrates certain points correctly. After multiple misfits, we give up looking to others to give us the replica of what we have in our mind and we end up creating these resources ourselves.
So, what’s the problem here? We could say that issues could be (1) no one has thought of creating this resource therefore it does not exist, or (2) someone has created such a resource but it is not made available.
In either case, there must be some available resources that can be adapted to convey what you have in mind. The end result does not have to appear sexy. As long as it conveys the meaning that you wish to, it is perfectly good enough! Remember that unless you have students who are attentive enough to complain about the misalignment of text boxes, your efforts are probably “wasted” on fulfilling your own selfish desires for perfection.
2. Share Resources
I am not sure about you but I have personally benefited tremendously from sharing resources with colleagues and friends. Not only does sharing solve the issue of having to start from scratch, but it also inspires new ideas beyond our personal paradigm.
It is hence a no-brainer that… a wider network of educators will grow a richer pool of resources. So, search the net and join teacher communities. Create shared drives with friends to share ideas and resources (of course, while respecting intellectual rights and ownership). Since sharing is a two-way street, building a community of giving members will make this journey more sustainable and enjoyable.
3. Find your own balance
There is a lot of talk about what one should prioritise as an educator. Some would caringly remind us about the importance of self-care while others can shamelessly declare that every and anything would be “part of your job and responsibility”.
Speaking from experience, it is interestingly difficult to digest BOTH comments. Self-care reminders fall on deaf ears as our care for students makes us go for the endless “one last push”. Critical comments fuel that same desire and make us push even harder.
Finally, we are forced to stop is when we are physically or psychologically burnout.
Much like an overstretched spring, such moments often leave irreparable damage.
So the bottom line is: you have to find YOUR own balance. Ask yourself truthfully if your current approach is sustainable. Echoing Points 1 and 2, do not be afraid to seek help and rely on others! As the saying goes: “Travel fast, go alone. Travel far, go together.” As we all know, education is never a sprint so find some buddies and turn this marathon into a relay!
Doing something about feeling burnout
We know how entrenched these issues are and we think that it is about time someone does something about it. We created LEARND.online in hopes to support you with these issues. As a learning resources marketplace, we hope to make teaching and learning materials more accessible to students and educators.
We envision LEARND.online to be a site where you can:
- Find quality resources designed by fellow educators easily and at affordable prices (decided by those who uploaded their resources)
- Share your hard work so that other educators AND students can benefit
- As a BONUS, earn some side income should you decide to put a price tag on your work
Win-Win-Win
With LEARND.online, you can save up on time and effort by leveraging resources from others. By sharing your work, you benefit others (and your wallet) for no additional effort! Together, you win, they win and we all win!
While you can share your complete masterpieces like those video tutorials that you prepared for Home-Based Learning during circuit breaker, you can also:
- share simple images of your self-created acronym to remember a difficult piece of content,
- your self-illustrated diagrams that emphasise certain critical elements that are missing/lacking in existing diagrams,
- a brilliantly designed question that innovatively tests a concept… and the list goes on! If you are motivated enough to invest effort into the creation of these resources, they must definitely hold some incredible value.
Having talked the talk about encouraging educators to share more, we walk the walk by ensuring that there are NO fees involved in signing up or listing your products. We strive for win-win and will only take a modest cut from each successful paid transaction to keep the site going. In other words, we are self-funding this project with hopes that it can help educators and learners better enjoy the teaching and learning journey.
We look forward to having you and your peers on board. Sign up here today!
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LEARND.online endeavours to leverage technology to make learning resources more accessible and sustainable. As an online learning resource marketplace, we aim to empower educators and learners to share amazing self-created learning resources with those in need. You can find cheatsheets, notes, practices, study guides, mindmaps, lesson plans, free test papers and more! Sign up is entirely free! Visit us today and thank you for your support.
LEARND.online — Online Learning Resource Marketplace