Is Teaching Stressful?

There's never enough time. I know that sounds generic but I mean it in a very specific way. I have 26 students. I'm supposed to differentiate instruction for all of them. That means I should be adjusting my lessons based on each kid's level. Some of my kids read at a 3rd grade level. Some read at a 7th grade level. Same classroom. Same lesson. I'm supposed to create three different versions of every assignment: one for below grade level, one for on grade level, one for above. That's what the district wants. Three versions of every assignment, times five subjects, times five days a week. That's 75 differentiated assignments a week. I make maybe 15. Because that's what's physically possible in the hours I have.

My planning period is 40 minutes. I spend half of it in meetings. Grade-level team meeting on Mondays. Data review on Wednesdays. SST meetings when they come up, and they come up a lot because I currently have two students going through the special education referral process, and each referral involves documentation that takes about three hours total. The other half of my planning period is parent emails and copies. Actual lesson planning happens at home. Saturday mornings, usually. My wife Janine knows that Saturday before noon is school work time. She doesn't love it. I don't love it either. But the alternative is walking into Monday unprepared, and unprepared in a room with 26 ten-year-olds is not something you do twice.

The thing people don't get is that time scarcity in teaching isn't about efficiency. I'm efficient. I've been doing this 18 years. I have systems. The scarcity is structural. There are more tasks than there are minutes in a contract day. That's not a me problem. That's a math problem. And nobody's adding minutes.

The kids are fine. The kids are always fine. It's the parents. I teach in an affluent suburb and the parent involvement is, I'll say intense. Which is the professional word for what it actually is, which is constant monitoring and frequent second-guessing of every decision I make.

Last month I gave a reading assessment. Standard district benchmark, nothing unusual. A student scored in the "approaching" category, which means she's close to grade level but not quite there. She's doing fine. She's growing. I sent the results home with a note explaining what the categories mean and suggesting some reading strategies for home. Her mother emailed me that evening, cc'd the principal, and asked for a "detailed explanation of the assessment methodology and how it accounts for students who may test poorly under timed conditions." That's a direct quote. I read it three times.

I wrote back a careful, detailed response explaining the assessment, how it's administered, what it measures, and how her daughter's score compares to her fall score, which showed growth. I spent about 45 minutes on that email. The mother responded asking if we could schedule a meeting. I scheduled the meeting. In the meeting, which was 30 minutes, the mother said she'd had her daughter assessed privately and the private assessment showed grade-level reading. She wanted to know why my assessment disagreed. I explained that different assessments measure different things, that both could be accurate, and that the important thing is that her daughter is reading more and enjoying it. The mother was polite. She wasn't hostile. But the underlying message was clear: your professional judgment needs to be justified to my satisfaction.

That family took about two and a half hours of my time for a result that meant "your child is doing fine and getting better." Multiply that by the four or five parents each year who respond this way, and you see where the stress comes from. It's not conflict. It's the constant proving. I have a master's degree in education and 9 years of experience and I spend a meaningful amount of my professional time justifying routine assessments to parents who Googled reading levels at 10 PM.

I teach at a school where 89% of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch. That's not a number I throw around for sympathy. It's the context that everything else sits on. It means a lot of my kids come to school with stuff going on at home that I know about and can't fix. Housing instability. A parent who got locked up over the weekend. Not enough food. I had a student last year who wore the same shirt three days in a row and I didn't say anything because I know the difference between a kid who likes that shirt and a kid who doesn't have another option. You learn to read that.

The stress isn't the behavior that comes from that. Kids act out. They do. A kid who didn't eat dinner last night and didn't sleep well because of noise in the apartment is going to have a hard time sitting still for a lesson about the water cycle. I get that. I plan for that. I build movement into my lessons, I keep snacks in my desk drawer, I let kids put their heads down for five minutes without making it a thing. That's not what stresses me.

What stresses me is the accumulation. I've been doing this for seven years and I've had maybe 50 or 60 students whose situations were serious enough that I filed a report or talked to our school social worker, Ms. Okafor. Each one of those kids is a name and a face and a story I carry. Darius, who drew pictures of houses during free time because his family moved three times in one school year. Kayla, who came to school early every day because school had heat and her apartment didn't always. Tyler, who told me his mom's boyfriend hit her and I had to make the call to CPS during my lunch break and then go back and teach fractions to the whole class including Tyler, who was sitting at his desk knowing I knew.

There's no therapy built into this job. There's no debriefing. Ms. Okafor is overloaded. She covers two schools. She's doing her best but there's one of her and 400 kids between both buildings. I process most of this alone, in my car, on the drive home. My wife Aisha asks me how my day was and some days I say "fine" because the real answer would take an hour and ruin dinner. The stress in this job isn't one thing. It's the sediment. It builds up layer by layer and there's no system in place to remove it.

I've been teaching long enough to watch the same ideas come back with different names. When I started in 2002, we were doing "standards-based grading." Then "proficiency-based learning." Then "competency-based education." Then the district went back to traditional grading for a few years. Now we're doing "standards-based grading" again. It's the same concept with a new PowerPoint.

In my 24 years, I've been through No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core adoption, Common Core partial rollback, a shift to "locally developed standards" that were basically Common Core with different headers, a technology initiative that put Chromebooks in every classroom in 2016, a 1:1 iPad initiative that replaced the Chromebooks in 2019, and a return to Chromebooks in 2021 because the iPads broke too easily. Each one of these came with training days, new materials, new platforms, new expectations, and an implicit message of: what you were doing before wasn't working.

The stressful part isn't learning new things. I can learn. I've been adapting for two and a half decades. The stressful part is the churn. Nothing gets enough time to work before it gets replaced. I spent two years getting comfortable with a writing curriculum called Units of Study. I built supplemental materials. I adapted it for my AP Lit students. I had it dialed in. Then the district dropped it and adopted a new program called EL Education. Fine. New program. I went to the training. I rebuilt my materials. That was three years ago and I've heard rumors that they're "evaluating alternatives" again. My colleague Jim, who's been here 20 years, calls it the "five-year cycle." New superintendent comes in, adopts their preferred program, trains everybody, leaves before results come in, next superintendent starts over.

I can't invest in a system that I know will be replaced. So I do what works. I teach writing the way I've always taught writing, which is: read good writing, talk about why it's good, try it yourself, get feedback, revise. That works regardless of what the program is called. But I spend a lot of energy translating what I'm actually doing into whatever language the current initiative uses, so that my lesson plans look compliant in the system. That translation work, making real teaching look like the mandated version of teaching, that's exhausting. And it's completely invisible to anyone outside the building.

Nobody talks about how physical teaching is. I'm a PE teacher so my version is more obvious, but regular classroom teachers are on their feet six, seven hours a day too. I teach eight periods. Eight groups of kids, kindergarten through 8th grade, rotating through the gym. I'm demonstrating, I'm moving equipment, I'm refereeing, I'm managing 30 kids in an open space with balls and cones and the acoustics of a gymnasium, which means everything echoes and my voice has to project over all of it.

I had vocal nodules three years ago. From projecting. My doctor, Dr. Pham, told me I needed to stop yelling in the gym. I said that's literally my job. She gave me exercises. I bought a portable microphone, the kind fitness instructors wear. It helped some. But the nodules came back last year and now I'm on a voice rest protocol where I'm supposed to avoid projecting for extended periods. Again: that is my job. I teach 8th graders basketball in a gym with 30-foot ceilings. There's no quiet version of that.

My knees are a separate issue. I've been running, squatting, demonstrating, and playing alongside kids for 21 years. I had a meniscus repair in 2022. My orthopedist said I have the knees of a 60-year-old. I'm 47. I ice my knees every night while watching TV. My wife Linda jokes that the ice packs are my evening accessory. It's funny and it's also, I mean, it's not funny. I'm watching younger PE teachers come in, 25 years old, full of energy, and I know they don't think about their knees yet. They will. Around year 12, they will. Nobody mentions this in the education program. Nobody says "by the way, this job will physically wear you down." They talk about lesson plans and differentiation. Nobody talks about what 21 years of concrete floors do to your joints.

I teach a bilingual class, which means I teach all subjects in both English and Spanish. I have 24 students, all of whom are learning English at varying levels. Some were born here and speak English at home but Spanish with grandparents. Some arrived from Mexico or Guatemala in the last year and are still building English vocabulary. I differentiate every lesson in two languages across five subjects. I create materials in both languages. I communicate with parents in both languages, which means parent emails take twice as long because I write one version in English and one in Spanish.

I have a master's degree in bilingual education from UTSA. I'm certified in ESL and bilingual education. I'm fluent in two languages, which I use professionally every hour of every day. My salary is $52,400. My college roommate Valentina works in corporate communications at a healthcare company in Austin. She writes internal newsletters. One language. She makes $78,000. I'm not bitter about it but I'm also not going to pretend the comparison doesn't exist.

The stress isn't the money, exactly. It's what the money communicates. I do something specialized, cognitively demanding, and socially important. I'm teaching children to read in two languages, which research shows improves cognitive flexibility, academic outcomes, and career prospects. And the system values that at $52,400. My principal Dr. Garza tells me all the time that I'm invaluable. The word "invaluable" at contract negotiation time apparently translates to a 2% step increase. I sat in a staff meeting last month where the superintendent told us we were "the backbone of the community." I went home and paid $1,400 in rent and ate leftover rice and beans for dinner. You can't deposit "backbone of the community" at Wells Fargo.

The worst version of this is when someone outside of education says "well, you get summers off." I work summer school three of the last five years because I needed the money. The two summers I didn't, I did curriculum writing for the district, which paid a daily rate of $150 for 8-hour days. So no. I don't "get summers off." I get summers where I work a different version of the same job for less money. But the myth persists because it's convenient. It lets people justify paying teachers less.