Experiental Bipolar Disorder and how teachers deal with highs and lows

Six weeks into my teaching career, and I mentioned to one of my colleagues that it genuinely feels as though I have some kind of bipolar disorder. I touched on this briefly in my last post. Allow me to explain further, on a 'high' day.

Roundabouts

Monday

Start of the week. I organised lesson plans last Friday, so I'm ahead. Students lag in energy because they've just come off the weekend. Class goes relatively smoothly. I enjoy myself and the conversations I have with most of the students. I'm good at this job.

Tuesday

Kids' energy has increase enexponentially. They're difficult to lasso into study, but manageable overall. I am tired by the end of the day, and crabby about some failures in behaviour management, but overall, I'm feeling... fine. And then I have a staff meeting. Older colelagues, who I should be learning from, are doing that thing where they're kind of talking down to me just a little, because I'm brand new, so I'm not really a reliable source of opinions right now--which is fair, but sigh.

Wednesday

Who gave these kids laptops? Who thought hiring me was a good decision? Any instruction I give goes over students' heads. Are they even listening? I feel like I'm talking to myself. I feel like the homework I set meant nothing. I feel like I didn't get through any of the plan I set for these classes. What's the point of me being here? God, I suck at this job. Let me go bury myself. I have no energy at the end of the day. I'm overstimulated. Please don't talk to me. Just let me sit.

Thursday

Behaviour management actually works today. Year 8s are stellar. Year 7s are forced into work through strict regulations and timers. I get through a whole lesson plan, four times, without issue. Students understand what I'm asking of them. I'm totally fine at this job--hell, I'm capable, and I'm not embarrassed when a colleague walks in. What a success!

Friday

End of the week. Let's finish this work I've set out and organise lessons for next Monday. Holy shit, I like this job.

Swings

In my placements, I shared an office with my supervising teachers. It was a small group of people who rarely spoke, despite usually being in the same department. Now, keep in mind that two of these placements were in private schools--so whether that particular cultural factors into the communal space and discussions about student behaviour, I'm not sure.

(It could also be that every single one of them was overstimulated and needed permanent office quiet-time, but I digress.)

At my current school, I'm lucky to have an office along with most other teachers. Behind me sits a fellow newbie (to the school), and across from me is a fellow Year 7 English teacher. Colleagues walk past us, including student coordinators, well-being officers, and principals, who pop their heads in from time to time. This kind of set-up isn't possible in all schools, for obvious staff/school-size reasons.

Teachers need to speak to one another, not just professionally, but on a shared-experience basis. For those who share a form group with a group of teachers, speaking and decompressing with one another effectively lightens the load of the trauma and stress of an environment that can be, for all intents and purposes, rather unpredictable. This is doubly so for brand-new teachers such as myself, only previously exposed to the barely-reigned chaos of 23 students.

It's not even necessarily students causing all the stress. I'm not meant to be an expert at teaching (without supervision) 29 days into the job--and yet, the self-imposed feeling of ineptitude I have upon conferencing with my colleagues, feeling still like the student in the room, regardless of if I am indeed that student. Two years in a Masters of Teaching does not a teacher make, after all.

But above all, we need to switch off. I have a policy: leave the work laptop at work. Despite this attempt to separate work from home, however, I still find myself occasionally checking work emails at 8pm when I have no business to. I still open Compass after I get home to check whether my students have done what they said they would and upload their work, or have messaged me. I refuse to message students back after 4:30pm, and yet here I am, still checking to see and prepare for what they want to know tomorrow. Why?

I really love my job.

But I also hate that I like my job sometimes.