What Causes Teacher Burnout: A Former Third Grade Teacher Shares The Biggest Contributor
I was sitting at my kitchen table at 9:17pm on a rainy Tuesday in May, wrapping 28 dinosaur erasers and sticky note pads for my third graders’ end-of-year gifts, when my phone pinged with a reminder from my own 6-year-old’s pediatrician: I’d missed picking up his daily asthma inhaler three days in a row. My coffee mug had gone cold an hour earlier, the dollar-store dinosaur wrapping paper was crinkling all over my lap, and my son was already asleep down the hall – I’d forgotten to read his bedtime story because I’d stayed late at school to finish a mandatory trauma-informed training module that didn’t start until after the final bell. That was the night I knew I couldn’t keep doing it. When people ask what the biggest contributor to my burnout was, they almost always guess wrong. It wasn’t the rowdy kids, or the entitled parents, or even the low pay (though that didn’t help). It was all the work that had nothing to do with teaching, piling up so high I couldn’t actually do the job I’d been hired for.
I taught third grade for seven years at a public elementary school in southwest Ohio, and I loved it. I loved watching a kid who struggled with reading finally finish a whole chapter book on their own, I loved the messy art projects and the recess jokes and talking a seven-year-old down from a panic attack after they lost their favorite jacket. By the end of my seventh year, though, I was working 12-hour days six days a week, and almost half of that time wasn’t spent with kids. It was filling out progress reports, updating curriculum maps to match the latest state standard shift, completing mandatory online modules that never actually translated to anything I did in the classroom, answering dozens of parent emails after hours, buying snacks, tissues, erasers, and even books for my classroom out of my own paycheck because the building budget got cut year after year.
One year, the district added a requirement that we complete a 10-part social-emotional check-in for every student every single week. I agreed that checking in on kids’ mental health was important – that was part of why I took the job. But we didn’t get any extra time in the day to do it, no extra support to help make it happen. I ended up filling out all 28 check-ins on Sunday mornings while my son played alone in the backyard, because there was no time during the school day. And the irony wasn’t lost on me: I was so busy filling out check-in forms for the district that I didn’t have 10 extra minutes to sit and talk with the kid in my class who was still crying three times a week after his parents moved out.
When I quit, a lot of parents brought me cards and gifts and said they wished there was something they could do to help. And don’t get me wrong – the homemade cookies and the heartfelt notes meant the world. But the thing that would have actually helped most isn’t something most people think about. It’s the unspoken pressure that teachers feel to be available 24/7, to cover every gap in the system, to take on every new mandate without pushing back, and that pressure piles up faster than any gift can cut it down.
For teachers still in the classroom, I learned a few small, concrete things before I quit that took some of the weight off. I started setting a hard stop at 4:30pm every day, closed my laptop, and didn’t open work email again until the next school day. Even if that meant a parent waited 12 hours for a reply, it was worth it to get my evenings back with my own kid. I stopped buying every supply my classroom needed out of my own check. At the start of every year, I sent a short note to parents that listed 3 or 4 things we need extra of – tissues, extra snack, dry erase markers – and I didn’t buy any of it until those ran out. I said no to joining the extra holiday committee and the new curriculum working group that met twice a month after school, because those things weren’t helping my kids learn, they were just checking boxes for the district.
For parents, there are concrete small things you can do too that make a bigger difference than you might think. First, if you email or text a teacher after 4pm or on a weekend, don’t expect a reply until the next work day. Most teachers have their work email on their personal phones, and many feel pressured to reply right away even when they’re at their own kid’s game or having dinner with their family. Just letting them wait until work hours takes a huge weight off. Second, if your child’s teacher sends a list of needed classroom supplies and you’re able to grab an extra pack of tissues or a box of pencils when you’re at the store, send it in. Most teachers spend hundreds of dollars a year on supplies, and even one extra pack adds up. Third, when there’s a school budget vote or a school board election, show up. Ask candidates how they plan to cut down on unnecessary admin work for teachers, not just how they plan to raise test scores.
I’m a part-time instructional aide now at a small local school, I leave at 3:30 every day, I almost never take work home. I get to spend most of my day sitting with kids, helping them read and work through math problems, which is what I wanted to do all along. A lot of my old friends are still teaching in public schools, and they’re still figuring it out day by day. Some days the small changes work, some days the pile gets too high again. There’s no quick fix for teacher burnout, because it’s a system problem, not a personal one. But even small shifts in what we expect from teachers, and what teachers expect from themselves, can take a little of the weight off.
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