Stress, Teaching and Life!

Teaching is a stressful job!………..Let’s get that statement out there from the beginning. Teaching is a stressful job.

Despite the media rhetoric of long holidays and short days spent drinking tea while sat at a desk, it is a strange and stressful job. It is not the only job I have had. I have had jobs that involved very tight deadlines, large amounts of money, international flights to deal with non-english speaking factories, international trade shows, magazines scrutinising every product I designed and at times very long working weeks but of all these things I have done teaching has proved to be the most unrelentingly stress ridden job I have had. Do not take this as an anti-teaching article, for I love teaching. I really do love it and I hope to do nothing else but it, but from bitter experience I have seen what stress can do to the career I love so much. In 2012 I had a nervous breakdown which changed my outlook on life and also on my profession and the stresses which it brings. Prior to the day it happened I had always had a mental image of a nervous or mental breakdown as being someone sat in a darkened room crying because life had become too much for them. I guess like many, wrongly, I had seen it as something that happens to weak people. I am not weak! If you knew me you would know that to be the case. In my life I have been very active, I have written motorcycles off in crashes, nearly drowned down a cave, been a thousand feet up a cliff with no ropes, been coughing blood after a fall climbing, had hypothermia, been hospitalised for dehydration, run cross country marathons and been involved in mountain rescues and of all the things that have happened to me, or I have inflicted upon myself rarely have any even slowed me down. I don’t mention those things to boast or big myself up and many of the people who know me will not know much of what I just mentioned but I say it here to illustrate the large void between how I thought breakdowns happened and who I was. In 2012 however I got first hand experience of a breakdown and it involved no crying and no sitting in a darkened room, it was far more physical than I could have imagined.

What happened next set me on a path, knocked me on my back and propelled me back up. It also led to research, awareness and some personal truths about teaching and stress. To read more and to see my research project and the end of the story read my new iBook for free now.