How teachers can deal with not being OK

Transcript

Mike Conrad [00:00:00] From PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs, this is Teacher Reporting Labs, bonus episode.

Michael Kaufman  Bah bah bah bah bah hey

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Mike Conrad Hey, it's Mike Conrad here.

Michael Kaufman [00:00:13] And Michael Kaufman. 

Mike Conrad [00:00:15] And we're just back to revisit the full conversation that we had with Dr. Melanie Schwartz on educator mental health and well-being.

Michael Kaufman [00:00:22] So as we end towards the school year, doctor Melanie Schwartz will be helping us out because she is a licensed psychologist and the owner of Viewpoint Psychology and Wellness here in Michigan. So let's take a listen to that conversation.

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Mike Conrad [00:00:41] We're looking for tools and resources for teachers to say, okay, I do need some help with this and who can I talk to? What about the teachers who think that they're just at the end of the rope, when people are leaving teaching in waves? What about those teachers that are just there at the end, and they don't know if they can continue on in this profession?

Dr. Melanie Schwartz [00:01:00] Well, for some of them, you know, some of them, the best option is to leave teaching. That's not what we want. But for some of them they may be, you know, they may not have the same coping skill sets that some people have …that, that’s what they need. And I'm not saying that that's where they need to go with it. But that is one option. The other option is have they you know, they've just reached a limit of I don't know what else to do, but the question is, what have they done to try to work through it during that time? Have they sought out therapy? Have they talked to their support system, family, friends, other colleagues…developing balance in their lives, or do they really lack that? They really have to develop some mindfulness. Are they doing that or are they just so burnt out they can't think clearly and they're just like, this is the easiest way to deal with this situation is I'm just going to leave the profession and go elsewhere. There's always options, but the best intervention in that is really looking at yourself and saying, is this really what I want to do? Or have I done everything I can to determine that this is where I'm at, or do I need to possibly look at some other options prior to that? And am I really utilizing everything I can to figure out if this is the best step for me?

Mike Conrad [00:02:08] I saw that you work with the West Bloomfield Police Department, a lot of trauma based professions. How can you compare those professions to talking to teachers?

Dr. Melanie Schwartz [00:02:19] I think we all live in a world over the last four years; well, we'll go with four years where the level of people who have experienced trauma has increased significantly from a variety of factors. And so while we're not necessarily witnessing the trauma that the police officers or fire department first responders see,  we're still enduring it and experiencing it and going through it. So they're witnessing it, which we are not necessarily doing. We're going through it. So there is, you know, some similarities in that trauma. It's trauma. But the difference is how we're experiencing it. When it comes to diagnosing somebody who has experienced trauma and has a PTSD diagnosis, it's all the same. Whether you've witnessed it or you're experiencing it, it still can….you know, you can develop the diagnosis of PTSD.

Mike Conrad [00:03:10] And I think PTSD is an important thing to bring up. I mean, there's a kind of a, you know, comical way to talk about it where if we do a zoom at work or we do a WebEx, you know, staff meeting, I get PTSD of teaching virtually all over again. And it's hard. And it's, it's it's, you know, zoom fatigue was real. You know, trying to teach virtually was impossible. And I think that a lot of us still have a little PTSD. But then even outside of that, situations in the classroom, if you have an experience with a child or a student or a parent, and then you experience that again later, those feelings come washing back.

Dr. Melanie Schwartz [00:03:45] Absolutely.

Mike Conrad [00:03:46] Yeah. What can you tell us about that feeling?

Dr. Melanie Schwartz [00:03:48] If we have experienced trauma, the feeling—the brain doesn't differentiate between time. Those feelings come right back when you're perceiving that same experience over again. It might be a different experience, but it still feels traumatic. So then it just comes washing back from what you previously experienced. If you haven't dealt with it through, working through it in some way, whether it's in therapy or on your own, but it will be the exact same emotional experience, regardless of time.

Mike Conrad [00:04:14] On a related note to that. We received a question from a teacher at Beaverton Academy of Science and Engineering in Beaverton, Oregon from Jared. And Jared asks on a daily basis, how can we feel a sense of completion with a job that's never done? And that's not even talking about perfectionism, that's just talking about doing your job and knowing when you go to bed at night, you're in the hole. What can you tell anybody that has that sense of feeling? And I think in teaching, it's a pretty common daily emotion.

Dr. Melanie Schwartz [00:04:42] You have to change your expectations based on what is happening that day. Because if you go in with, you know, I'm going to get through this today and I'm going to get through this today. You don't know what's going to happen that day, how the kids are going to be, what's going on with them emotionally, what else is going to get in the way of that day? You know, in this day and age, it can be a variety of things. And so you have to change, lower your expectations of what you're going to accomplish and be okay with that, that there's nothing wrong with that, okay? You have no control over what goes on in your environment. You have control over how you handle what goes on in your environment. And so if you have a chaotic day or the kids aren't listening, cooperating or distracting or going through whatever they're going through, you have to focus on that. You can't focus on the lesson per se, because that becomes secondary at that point. So it's more, you know, lowering the expectation of that. The problem is, I know you also have admin who are saying, well, you have to get through this, this, this mess. We all understand it's an unrealistic expectation. But at the end of the day, you're going to get through what you need to get through. Okay, and whatever that looks like. And even if it's not, one day it'll catch up at another point. Or even if it doesn't, then, you know, maybe that's a discussion to have at some point with admin or whoever. But I think there has to be looking at the situation differently. And that's how you have to approach your day: not what's going to happen, but how you're going to deal with what happens.

Mike Conrad [00:06:02] So you're saying all those memes I see on Instagram saying it's okay to not be okay is okay?

Dr. Melanie Schwartz [00:06:09] Yes, absolutely. .

Mike Conrad [00:06:14] Yeah. I think, on a personal note—this is some years ago now. But my son, when he was 11 years old, called a family meeting and my wife and I were like, oh, this ought to be good. Okay. So he sits us down and he sits down and says, okay. And he's 11. He says, you guys are never home. I spend more time with grandma than I do with you. When you are home, you're arguing all the time, and when you're not arguing, you don't have time to do something with me because you're working. And he went– he spent a good couple minutes, you know, just throwing us into the fire. When he finished, I said, are you done? He said, yeah. I said, okay, good. All right. Tomorrow I'm going to resign my union position. Tomorrow I'm going to cancel this club meeting. And that was when I learned that it was okay to say no because it was not affecting …my teaching was probably skyrocketing at the time; I think I was probably the most involved that I was, but my family was hurting, so I had to back off. And when I started telling everybody at work, I'm sorry, I can't do that. I'm sorry, I can't do that—nobody criticized me or judged me on that. And I feel like that's something that we forget that we're allowed to do.

Dr. Melanie Schwartz [00:07:20] Right? Absolutely. Absolutely. Because there's always pressure to do more. I mean, we even do that with the students, right? Do more and more and more and more. Join this, have more homework. You know, the expectations are higher. The..well, it’s the same thing for the adults as it is for the students, but it's not healthy for the students and not healthy for the adults either. And it's learning how to navigate that. And in this world that we've created a lot of pressure and what success looks like. And success unfortunately, is equal to being busy and and, you know, doing more and more and more in the reality of the situation: that's not true, because that makes us have more mental health issues and less quality of life. So it's learning how to navigate that. It's a very difficult task to really look at yourself and see, and unless you have your child coming to you and saying you're not home, I need more from you, which doesn't happen all that often. You know, it's on you to look at it yourself and say, where do I have to do this differently? But people unfortunately don't get to that point until they reach burnout sometimes, which is too far, you know, if you've gone too far in it.

Mike Conrad [00:08:27] Well, teacher burnout, I think there's a whole —we could do an entire podcast, I think, on teacher burnout—but you mentioned something that I think it's really fascinating. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about it, which is sometimes we think success as being busy, and how to cope with that. So what could you suggest? You know, in a world where we're constantly being told to do more, doing more, we're not hitting the expectations, but because we're doing all this stuff, we thought we had a successful day. How can we cope with that?

Dr. Melanie Schwartz [00:08:54] Again, it really goes back to changing your thinking at it. So I look at the world in two ways. It's your thinking and your behavior, okay? We can change our behavior and we can change our thinking okay. And that's going to create a better environment for us overall and decrease. If you are having symptoms of mental health issues, that will decrease it, if you navigate some of that. We listen to what's kind of coming at us, okay. But we're not listening to ourselves all the time. We're listening to the pressures of the world. You know what success looks like on TV or anywhere else, or even this world or what, you know, people are teaching us how to do, okay, whether that's coming from teachers, because that's what they're being told they have to do, or it's coming from social media, or it's coming from all these things that are coming at us that are overstimulating on a regular basis. Okay? And if it's repeatedly coming at you, that's when you start to believe it.

Mike Conrad [00:09:47] One thing that, you know, I, I am beginning to find out is that it's okay to take a day.

Dr. Melanie Schwartz [00:09:53] Yes, absolutely.

Mike Conrad [00:09:54] As, as a school district, we are given, you know, 11 sick days per year. I used to not use them. Why would I use them? I have spring break. I've got holiday break. I've got Thanksgiving break. I now realize that on a Thursday I can take a day and I can throw a sub plan out there, and I can come in Friday feeling a little bit better, but not doing what some of my colleagues do, which is take a day off to do their job. So what's the danger of something like that?

Dr. Melanie Schwartz [00:10:20] What I will hear from clients is that it's more stressful for me to write a sub plan, not know who's going to be the sub in the class and let go of that control. So they just don't take care of themselves to avoid the anxiety of not having control over that day. Okay, so I will work with them on: it's more important to take care of you, that is, to take care of whatever else is going on you can like the class will be perfectly fine. It's not going to implode. Everything will be okay. And, you know, work with them on that. But yes, if you are just going, going, going and just saying, well, I don't need to take it, it's fine. I'll just keep going on with my day or my days or my week. You're well, what's going to happen is you're gonna get sick. Okay? Depending on what grade you're in working in— you already are in a germ infested environment on a regular basis. Your immunity is going to go down. It's going to affect your mental health. It's going to affect your, like you said, time with your family. It's going to affect your ability to be present with your friends and family or the activities that you're choosing to do when you're not working, because you're going to be so tired that you're not going to be present moving forward. So it's more harmful not to than it is to take that day.

Mike Conrad [00:11:36] So but, you know, and I see that because I know there's times where I start to feel sick because I'm just driving, you know, running myself into the ground. But some teachers will take one of their personal days, one of their sick days to sit at home and do all of their grading. So they're not taking that day for themselves or taking it to work. And then when they actually are sick, they can't take a day off as they're out of home, or they've taken their sick days because their kids are sick and they have to now take a sick day to be at home with their kid. So you're merging your personal life and your personal stresses and your professional stresses. Where do we go with that?

Dr. Melanie Schwartz [00:12:08] I think it's a much more complicated question or answer with moms who have to take days for their sick kids, because that is unfortunately something that happens a lot, especially people with young kids. So I don't know that I have an answer for that situation per se, because it's–it’s complicated. But I think that in terms of if you're taking those days and not using them the way that you need to use them, then maybe you're not balancing your time exactly as you need to and you're not saying no. And so you do need those days to take off, to do work in which you're that, you know, that's a vicious cycle that you're getting yourself into. So it does come back to setting boundaries and saying no. So that you…

Mike Conrad [00:12:48] I’m sensing a theme, I'm sensing a theme here

Dr. Melanie Schwartz [00:12:51] There's a big theme, there’s a big theme, Yeah, yes.

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Michael Kaufman [00:12:58] So as we get towards the end of the school year, hopefully you heard some interesting conversation and more importantly, some tools that you can use that can help you get through the end of this year and the beginning of next year, and something that you can always revisit and go, you know what? I can use this stuff. I need this now, and it will give you some help.

Mike Conrad [00:13:17] From PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs, this bonus episode for Teacher Reporting Labs was produced by SRL’s Community Engagement Manager Emily Hope Dobkin, edited by Evan Gulock, with support from Lead Podcast, Producer Briget Ganske

Michael Kaufman [00:13:29] And of course, many thanks to SRL editorial director Marie Cusick and executive producer Leah Clapman.

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