9. Leave it at home.

When you become a teacher you deal with a lot of emotions on a daily basis.  Being an art teacher, I have a different relationship with my students.  My classroom is open.  Students talk about almost anything and feel comfortable enough with me that they talk to me about fears about the future and personal stuff happening now in their lives.  I have made many referrals to the social worker.  This line of work is emotionally draining for any teacher.  At the end of the day I feel so drained.

My personal life is personal and I try to leave it at home when I am at work.  I also try to leave work at work.  It is easier, for me at least, to leave work at work.  I don’t usually take a lot of work home.  Family time is important and there is little place for the baggage of work when I am playing with my two kids.  That being said it still bleeds through sometime.  Just like at school sometimes our personal lives bleed into our professional lives.

Monday morning was a bad morning.  Getting the kids, my own kids, ready involved a lot of resistance.  I have to say I never quite recovered my bearings that day.  It set the tone for my whole day.  I had a student skip my class I so rarely have discipline problems to deal with anymore, one of my classes behaved like imbeciles because I had a block teacher come in and heaven forbid they behave like normal, and students kept cutting themselves because they didn’t listen to my instruction.  My whole day felt like a fog.  Today I am cringing, wondering how my classes will recover.  Not to say that this stuff wouldn’t have happened if I had a good morning, but I probably would have been in a mind-set to deal with it better.  I should have left it at home, but I didn’t.

This separation is hard even after years of teaching.  Work affects home and home affects work.  That is just the way it is.  I tell my students funny stories about my kids and I have students babysit my kids.  There is no true separation, but trying to keep a level of professionalism and making sure you don’t take your bad day out on your students is important.