I was taken by this recently-posted TED Talk from a Lincoln, NE high school English teacher.
A few important quotes from her talk:
They come to school with trauma, and when I go home every day, that goes home with me. And see, that’s the hard part about teaching. It’s not the grading, the lesson-planning, the meetings, though sure, those things do occupy a great deal of teachers’ time and energy. The tough part about teaching is all the things you can’t control for your kids, all the things you can’t change for them once they walk out your door.
and…
When we are constantly serving others, often between 25 and 125 students each day, our emotional piggy banks are constantly being drawn upon. After a while, it can become so depleted, that we just can’t bear it anymore. They call it “secondary trauma” and “compassion fatigue,” the concept that we absorb the traumas our students share with us each day. And after a while, our souls become weighed down by the heaviness of it all.
For many teachers, today is the last day of school before an extended holiday break.
Only it’s not a break, it’s a time to rebuild you emotional piggy bank so that you’re ready to serve your students again in January.