In rereading the last about teacher burnout, I was struck by a handful of things that my reader mentioned in the email. I thought it was powerful enough that it was worth digging into deeper, and yet I didn’t want to dilute the conversation that might come as a result of the emotional impact of the reader’s email.

With that being said, here are 20 insights from a 17-year veteran teacher about things that teachers ought to be doing.

1. Take care of your body
2. Avoid whiners
3. Get more sleep
4. Accept imperfection from yourself
   
5. Don’t expect to make everyone happy
6. Don’t abuse your sick days, but do use them
7. Relax more
8. Have trusted friends who can smack you upside the

…

About a month ago, I received this email in my Inbox:

After 17 years of teaching, I was diagnosed with ‘burnout’ and needed to take some time off. I fought it, but when the lab results showed body systems shutting down, I complied… for awhile. Part-time only made it worse. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. I LOVED my job, my students, my teaching. I dreaded the politics, the nay-sayers, the whiners. Still, how could I be burned out? I thought that only happened to folks who hated what they were doing or had been there too long. It seems remaining a teacher at the top of your game requires more than 3 hours of sleep per night,…

Think back 5 years. March 2004. It feels like an eternity ago! For me, that was when I really hit the wall. That was when my head director told me that my contract would not be renewed. I resigned in lieu of nonrenewal. I spent the remainder of the semester learning like crazy. In fact, that is the experience that eventually formed the inspiration to begin this blog (read more here). But that’s really not the point of this email, the thought just struck me and I realized how quickly time passes and how much I’ve grown since then.

5 years ago, there was no MySpace (until August 2003), no Twitter, no Facebook. Nada. Blogs were beginning to take off…

This is a guest post by Pamela, who doesn’t currently have her own blog. Pamela teaches elementary in Michigan.

Ideas for organizing your subcategories
In part 1 of this series, I talked about the shortcomings of traditional to-do lists and the increased productivity that results from using a to-do schedule. With a to-do schedule, your list is organized by day, and each day is broken down into subcategories. The schedule makes it easy to plan ahead, since you have a list for each of the next 7-10 days. Today we’ll talk about some of the subcategories you might use for your daily lists.

One way to organize your day is by using time of day categories

…

In the Christmas break, I am looking back at this blog’s growth and development. I began writing a little bit for the blog in February, but didn’t officially launch it for real until June. Since that time, growth has been pretty consistent. I now seem to regularly get a small number of comments for every article I write, with some eliciting more than others. As I look through the blog’s archive, it strikes me that there are some articles that have either been buried deep in the archives, or for whatever reason, have gone unnoticed by my readers.

So I am giving all of those articles a chance to redeem themselves, come up to the light of day. Here is…

This may well be the first time I have written about my teaching life without really setting out a solution or providing much helpful information. Let me know what you think.

Last Friday, the other band director I work with had a mild stroke. He is recovering and is at home resting now. The doctors told him to not return to work for six weeks. As you might imagine, Christmas is a terrible time for band directors to be out like this.

I got to take his band on a Christmas Tour on Thursday, and my band today. We have to make arrangements with other band directors to come over from other campuses to cover the classes that are here…

This is a guest post by Pamela, who doesn’t currently have her own blog. Pamela teaches elementary in Michigan.

Traditional to-do lists
When I think of a traditional to-do list, I think of a sheet (or scrap) of paper with a list of all the things you need to do. This is a good start, but there are a few problems I’ve found with this type of list:

1. There’s no organized pattern
   As soon as you think of something else, you just add it to the bottom of the list. As tasks are completed, you cross them off. Before long, the list is difficult to read and important tasks are overlooked because there are so many scribbles

…

As we come to the conclusion of Reader Appreciation Month, I want to summarize some of the things that we have learned. Today, I’ll focus on the incredible wealth of knowledge that we have learned about classroom management.

I found that when I put all of the tips together, I had over 70 suggestions. I combined a few of them and broke them down into categories. The tips all fell into four categories: Personal, Student and Parent Relationships, Organization and Teaching, and Behavior and Rules. After consolidating, I came up with 50 classroom management tips I have learned this month.

Personal tips for effective classroom management

1. Find out who you are as a person; find your strengths, weaknesses, and

…

I have decided to compile all of the articles from my series 25 Tips For Less Stress into one handy ebook. The Instant De-Stress Handbook is completely free to download. To get your copy, simply download it here.

Go ahead, tell your friends. Email the ebook to them. Recommend they come check out my blog. You know you want to!

This past Tuesday, I took a day off of school. This is not normal for me, and I even had to fight my urge to go up to school and make sure things were running smoothly. I even drove up to the school and chose not to get out of the car.

Why? Because I had a chance where I knew I could relax for a day and things wouldn’t fall apart. I suppose it’s sort of a building process for me of letting go of my band.

I don’t like to miss school. I remember my parents encouraging me when I was in high school to miss a day when I didn’t fell well. I have been debating missing…

I love reading. I don’t do it nearly enough, but I still do love it so. I find that many people don’t read a single book after they graduate from high school.

As teachers, we are also supposed to be lifelong learners. We should be desperate to learn about more and more stuff.

I find that as I read more books, especially nonfiction books, I learn more and am able to come to the place of deeper peace with myself. As I learn more about the world, I also learn more about myself. Though personal development books challenge my ideas about the world, they also challenge me to grow and become a better person.

I generally don’t read much education…

As I mentioned yesterday, westerners generally have too much stuff. That is the result of an extravagant lifestyle that television and popular media promote. The idea is that we shouldn’t be satisfied with what we have. That’s the whole underlying motivation behind much of the advertising industry.

Credit cards are a big source of woe for many people. They are a major cause for bankruptcies in America and they are really a symptom of a much greater issue. The issue is dissatisfaction.

In the last 17 months, I have paid off over $8,500 in debts. Through listening to Dave Ramsey and reading his book The Total Money Makeover and reading Trent’s blog The Simple Dollar, I have come to realize…

My name is Joel. I have too much stuff.

Most people in the western world have way more stuff than we know what to do with. The thriving success of self storage units is a testimony to this fact.

Possessions add clutter
We spent all last week looking at steps to reduce stress by decluttering your life. Some people recommend simply ignoring the clutter. That is definitely one valid option. It doesn’t work well for me, though. So I strive to reduce the amount of stuff I own that can potentially add clutter, which will in turn increase my stress level.

I am not necessarily advocating living as a hermit or social discontent, but I have personally found that…

I got an email from one of our secretaries yesterday asking me to call one of the other administrative assistants. The message left no indication of why I should call her. I have not yet called her and I don’t intend to do so. I have a problem with phone calls.

In a world where email has become a standard of communication at work, phone calls are a mere inconvenience

Phone calls pose as important interruptions
Often they are unimportant or at the very least delayable. At the worst, they are totally unimportant. Phone calls allow someone else to control our environment.

I don’t answer the phone during class
I made the decision my third year of teaching to never…

Time is a commodity where everyone is equal. But some people seem to do a whole lot more with their time and others seem to do a whole lot less. But we all stay busy. The problem is that some people choose how to fill their lives and other people allow their lives to be filled.

It’s so easy to get into the trap of agreeing to do everything that anyone asks us to do. Ever wonder why it is the youngest teachers who end up doing the most work in many schools? It’s because the experience teaches us that our class suffers when we take on too many responsibilities.

Basic time management

1. List your responsibilities
2. Prioritize your list,

…

One of the biggest drains on my energy is paper clutter. One of the biggest drains on the environment is trash. For these reasons, I try to do everything I can digitally rather than with paper.

I am so used to having so much paperwork, that I forget what it would be like without it. I went to school to be a band director, not a clerical assistant, but there are entire days where all I do is office work while another director teaches my class. Fundraising, returned progress reports, ARD forms, absence notes, hall passes, schedule change forms, field trip requests, receipts, deposit slips, you name it, I have it. Oh yeah, the students also occasionally turn work in…

If we’ve been following the stress reduction tips so far, we now have a clean desk at work, a clean computer desktop at work and home, we have begun to organize our email habits, and our house is beginning to look nicer. All of those things can be great, but if we have a 30 minute commute to and from work each day, a messy car will only take away from those efforts. I have a 5 minute commute, and when my car is messy, it bothers me.

Keeping the car under control is a pretty simple process of simply bringing things inside after each trip. As with everything this week, the problem comes in actually establishing those habits. Other…

Well, this is one of my weakest areas. I have my work environment very organized and neat, but my home is not. Part of my problem is that I know what to do and how to do it, I just don’t seem to find the energy after working 11-16 hour days to come home and do it. And in the marching season, many of my weekends are taken up traveling out of town to football games and/or marching competitions.

During the rest of the school year, I am generally pretty good about it, but still not perfect.

Why is a clean home important?
Again, the same as a clean desk provides peace of mind, so does a clean home….

We now have our Desk and Desktop under control. But how do we keep them under control? Better yet, how do we keep from having too much stuff coming into our lives that we allow to become clutter?

Email Inbox
Something that many teachers can’t seem to figure out is how to archive their old emails. Instead, they just leave them all in the inbox. I was at an inservice and the presenter apologized to one of the other teachers because she had been gone for a few days and overlooked the teacher’s email because it got lost in the shuffle. She didn’t get around to it until two weeks later. That’s just plain inexcusable! So how do we avoid…

Yesterday, we began decluttering our desk. Today, we will declutter our desktop.

One of the things that drives me crazy is when I install a new program and it leaves all sorts of icons on my desktop. It also drives me crazy when I have all sorts of popup notifications in my Windows taskbar telling me everything that I don’t need to know. These are nonurgent situations presenting themselves as though they were urgent. It disrupts my life and it’s something that I finally decided to put a stop to.

I am not going to attempt to reinvent the wheel on this one. I have found some great articles that thoroughly go through processes for getting things organized. What I…