Burning Out, Speaking Up

 Burning Out, Speaking Up

Alsabha A. Sayyed (Mentee)

Dr. Pratima Mishra

Associate Professor (Mentor)

H. G. M. Azam College of Education

Dr P. A. Inamdar University, Pune, Maharashtra, India

Some mornings, before the first bell has even rung, I'm already tired. Not the ordinary tiredness of a busy job — a deeper, heavier kind. The kind that makes you wonder how many more report cards, parent emails, and lesson plans you actually have left in you.

If you're a teacher, I bet you know exactly what I mean. If you're not, I hope by the end of this post you'll understand why so many of us feel this way and why it should matter to everyone, not just teachers. Because when we burn out, it's our students, our schools, and eventually our whole society that pays the price.

The Slow Leak Nobody Talks About: 

Burnout doesn't arrive all at once. It's not a single bad day or a rough week during exam season. It's a slow leak; the kind you don't notice until the damage is evident.

For most, it starts small. Staying twenty minutes later than planned to finish grading, then bringing work home "just this once." Then "just this once" becomes every night, and the evenings quietly stopped being theirs. In my case, I'd sit at the dinner table half-present, still running through tomorrow's lesson in my head. I'd wake up already thinking about the pile of ungraded essays instead of the class I actually got to teach that day. Somewhere along the way, the parts of the job I used to love, the small breakthroughs, the inside jokes with my students, the pure joy of watching a kid finally understand something started getting buried under logistics, paperwork, and a to-do list that never actually ended.

What makes it worse is how quietly it's normalized. Nobody warns new teachers that exhaustion isn't a sign you're doing something wrong, it's often a sign you're doing everything, for everyone, all the time, with almost no boundary around where the job stops and your life begins. We wear the tiredness like a badge of honour. "I haven't taken a real lunch break in years" gets said with a strange kind of pride, as if collapsing quietly is proof of how much we care.

It isn't. It's just exhaustion, and exhaustion doesn't make anyone a better teacher. If anything, it makes us shorter with our students, less creative in our lesson planning, and slower to notice the kid in the back row who's actually struggling. Burnout doesn't just cost teachers; it costs the very children we're supposedly protecting by never stepping back.

What Other Places Seem to Get Right

I've spent a lot of time reading about how teachers live and work in other parts of the world, and a few things keep coming up that I can't stop thinking about.

In some countries, teachers are trusted the way we trust doctors or engineers and are given real say over how they teach, what pace their classroom moves at, and how they assess their students, without someone hovering over their shoulder with a checklist. That trust alone seems to change everything. When you're treated like a professional instead of a suspect, the job feels lighter, even when the hours are the same.

In other places, the school day and the teaching day are simply shorter and more honest about what's actually required to do the job well: real blocks of time built in for planning and collaborating with colleagues, rather than expecting all of that invisible labour to happen for free after hours. Teachers there aren't superheroes squeezing lesson prep into their lunch break; the system is built around the fact that good teaching takes time, and that time gets protected.

And in a few countries that have historically pushed teachers to genuine breaking points, there's now real, top-down acknowledgment that something has to change: hour caps, redistributing the endless non-teaching tasks (club supervision, hallway duty, paperwork) to other staff, and reforms aimed at making sure "extra" doesn't quietly become "expected." Progress there is slow and imperfect, but at least the conversation has shifted from "teachers should manage their stress better" to "the system is asking too much."

What all of these places share, in different ways, is a simple idea: burnout isn't something you fix with a wellness poster in the staff room. It's something you fix by actually reducing the load, and by trusting the people doing the work.

What I'm Trying to Change, Starting with myself:

I don't have a rigid plan that fixes this. But I've started making small changes, and I think they matter more than they sound. I've started leaving school at an actual, fixed time, not "whenever the pile is done," because the pile is never done. Some days that means walking out with grading unfinished, and I've had to make peace with that. I've started protecting one evening a week that has absolutely nothing to do with school: no lesson planning, no email, nothing. It felt indulgent at first. It doesn't anymore.

I've also gotten better at asking for help instead of quietly absorbing everything myself. Talking to other teachers — really talking, not just complaining in the hallway for thirty seconds between classes has done more for me than almost anything else. There's something steadying about hearing someone else say "me too" instead of carrying the weight like it's uniquely yours. 

But I'll be honest: individual habits can only go so far. If the school day is genuinely too long, if the administrative load is genuinely too heavy, if the class sizes are genuinely unmanageable, no amount of personal discipline fixes that. That part isn't on teachers to solve alone.

That's why I think schools and school systems have real work to do too: not vague encouragement to "practice self-care," but actual structural change. Cutting the paperwork that doesn't need to exist. Giving teachers real input into decisions that affect their classrooms instead of handing down policy with no consultation. Making sure "covering someone's class" doesn't become an unpaid, unacknowledged extra job that falls on the same few overworked people every time. Building in actual protected time during the school day for planning and collaboration, instead of assuming it'll happen for free at home. And maybe most importantly, treating a teacher's exhaustion as information worth listening to, not an inconvenience to manage around.

I love this profession. But I've stopped believing that loving the work means I have to sacrifice everything else in my life for it. Sustainability isn't the opposite of dedication. It might actually be what dedication looks like, long-term. 

If you're a teacher reading this and nodding along, I see you. You're not weak, and you're not doing it wrong. You're carrying something heavy that was never meant to be carried alone, and it's okay to start putting some of it down!