Bandwidth, Boundaries, and Building on the Margins
Every few months I see the same kind of post appear on social media. It is usually about teacher burnout, and ends with some version of the reminder that our families can end up receiving whatever energy we have left after school.
We’ve all seen the posts, especially on LinkedIn, and some will have been from colleagues and friends. It resonates because there is a lot of truth in it.
There is also this persistent idea about teaching that never quite seems to disappear. ICT with Mr P often talks about this in his videos and on Facebook. Look at the school day from the outside and it can seem quite manageable. The children arrive in the morning, they leave in the afternoon, and then surely the teacher has the rest of the day to themselves. And the holidays! Oh those sweet holiday everyone talks about!
I can understand why people think that. It just isn’t how the job works.
The Quiet Shift: What Schools Are Expected to Provide
One of the things that makes teaching so tiring isn’t simply the amount of teaching we do. It is everything that has gradually been added around it.
The boundaries between what happens at home and what happens at school have changed. Schools are increasingly expected to deal with things that once happened around the kitchen table or were dealt with within the family.
Some of this is completely appropriate. Children spend a huge part of their lives at school, and schools have always had a role in helping children become independent and learn how to work with other people.
But there is a difference between supporting those things and becoming responsible for almost everything.
A teacher might spend part of the day teaching a child how to tie a tie or put on their shoes. Another day it might be table manners, personal hygiene or helping two children work through a disagreement that has nothing to do with the lesson they were supposed to be doing.
Then there are the bigger issues. Children need support with friendships, emotions, online behaviour, confidence and increasingly complicated social situations.
None of these things are necessarily a problem in themselves. The problem is the accumulation. And we haven’t even started including the planning, marking, and assessment tracking. Oh and endless meetings about behaviour, acedemic progress, safeguarding, wellness, and more.
The teacher is still expected to plan lessons, assess learning, communicate with families, support children who are struggling and keep the classroom moving. On top of that, there is everything else.
That changes the job. And Yes we all LOVE the job. But please don’t think we are in it for the free time or holidays.
The Bandwidth Economy and the Reality of Side Projects
This is where the idea of time becomes slightly misleading.
I can leave school at the end of the day and technically have a few hours before I go to bed. That doesn’t mean I have several hours of useful, focused time.
A school day involves hundreds of small decisions. You answer questions, solve problems, manage relationships, notice who is struggling, adjust what you are teaching and respond to things you could never have predicted when you planned the lesson.
By the time I leave, the problem is often not that I don’t have time, though this does happen at times as days in an International school setup with high expectations and rigorous learning can be long. It is more often that I don’t have much mental bandwidth left.
That becomes particularly interesting when you are also someone who likes building things outside school.
There are many teachers who write books, make videos, build websites, create resources, develop apps or run training. From the outside, it can be easy to assume that these people must have plenty of spare time.
Usually, they don’t.
Those projects happen around the edges of the job. Adn every single one of these does do from a place of passion!
Sometimes that means working on something for an hour in the evening. Sometimes it means using a Saturday morning while the house is quiet. Sometimes an idea sits untouched for weeks (Dare I say months) because school simply needs more from you. One such example if my fully finished manuscript for a children’s Middle Grade Fiction book. It’s fully written, edited, and ready to go. But as I want to do this the traditional way and find a publisher, now it’s about finding the bandwidth to query agents… that’s where it’s falling apart. (BTW if you are a literary agent looking for a highly visual humorous books that will appeal to reluctant readers ages 8 to 12, do get in touch)
I’ve written chapters, guides, built software, recorded podcasts and created resources in those gaps. Hey, even this blog post is written simply because I felt like sharing something that some of you will no doubt be reading in your own free time. None of it has happened because I had endless afternoons sitting around with nothing to do.
It is a choice about where the limited energy goes.
There are times when I would love to spend three hours working on a project, but after a full week at school, that isn’t realistic. The project waits. The weekend arrives, I find some time, and I carry on.
That is the part people don’t always see.
The Essential Anchor: Family and Community
You also can’t always separate this from what happens at home.
If you regularly arrive home mentally exhausted, home can easily become another place where people need something from you. Of course, that is part of family life. My two boys still need me, my lovely wife still needs me, and there is still dinner, homework, conversations and everything else that comes with having a family. And hear me out I absolutely love every single second if it!
What makes a difference is having people at home who understand what the job actually takes.
Having a partner who understands that sometimes you come through the door physically present but mentally still thinking about school makes a huge difference. So does having space to work on the things that matter to you outside your teaching role. That’s why it work for me, I have an incredibly supportive family but that cannot be said for everyone.
For me, there is another part to this.
When your children are part of the same school community, the relationship between work and family can feel different. They understand where you are going each day. They know the people and the environment. They can be part of the community that you spend so much of your time helping to build.
That doesn’t remove the pressure of the job, but it can change how that time feels.
Instead of school always feeling like something taking me away from my family, there are times when it feels like something we are part of together and that helps!
Redefining the Equation
I don’t think teaching is a job people should go into because they expect lots of free time.
The timetable can make the working day look deceptively shorter than it actually is. The real job is much bigger than the hours children spend in front of you.
That doesn’t mean teaching is all work and no reward. Quite the opposite. There are few things better than seeing a child finally understand something they have been struggling with, watching a reluctant learner become confident, or knowing that something you did made a difference. The relationship you built over time are some of the most valuable ones and you can really make an impact in a child life as that one person who believed in them. The one teacher who told them they could do it. The one teacher who was their to listen when nobody else would.
But meaningful work still takes energy.
And if you are someone who also wants to create, build, write or experiment outside school, you have to accept that those things may happen at the margins.
For me, that has meant becoming much more deliberate about where my energy goes. Some ideas have to wait. Some projects move slowly. Some weekends disappear into school work.
That’s okay.
The important thing is recognising the difference between having free time and having usable bandwidth.
Teachers don’t necessarily lack hours in the day. We often lack the mental space that those hours appear to offer.
And perhaps that is the part of teaching that is hardest to see from the outside.