Our division had our monthly administrators’ meeting and I met up with my friend, Scott, the vice-principal at my former school. He wanted to know how the year was going. He asked, “Joe, have you been leaving the school at a reasonable time?”
We have had conversations about work-life balance previously, in which I shared my goal for administration was to be home in time to do something outside with my kids after work. My son, Soren, loves the trampoline and my daughters like to walk our gravel road to the pump-jacks.
I guiltily admitted that I haven’t been choosing to leave. Most days I work to 5:30 or 6, and occasionally it’s later than that. I call my wife and apologize. “Honey, I won’t be home for supper. Feed the kids and I’ll try to be there to tuck them in.” Some days, the sum of my interaction with my kids is to give them a hug in the morning (if they are up) and giving them a bedtime hug. My eldest daughter has started setting an alarm so she can come upstairs to give me a sleepy hug before I slip out of the still-dark house.
“Do you know what was the single most profound piece of feedback that I received in my admin review?” Scott asked. “It was from a teacher who noticed that I left at 4:30 every day. She said when I left, it felt like she had my permission to leave, too. She thanked me for setting an example of taking care of personal well-being.”
Scott and I talked at length then about our priorities in life. My priorities are to live as a follower of Jesus, to be a good husband and father, and to do well in my career – in that order. Scott is younger than I, and just mapping out his family plans with his wife, but like me, family holds a higher degree of importance than work success.
In Steven Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, Covey outlines living a principled life, rooted in character development. His second habit is to begin with the end in mind. He cautions that it’s easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the business of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it’s been leaning against the wrong wall. Scott and I agree that we desire to be effective leaders, but not at the cost of a neglected spouse or children.
Similarly, I want my work colleagues to have the psychological space to pursue their personal visions, to determine which ladders to climb that will lead to life satisfaction. Life satisfaction is a synonym for happiness, a subjective perception of well-being when comparing one’s expectations with all the positive elements of life as a whole (Dagli & Baysal, 2017). In literature, life satisfaction and well-being are used interchangeably. Viac and Fraser (2020) establish a working definition of teachers’ well-being as a consequence of three groups of factors: situated, professional, and personal. Situated factors relate to a teacher’s specific context, such as the school or teaching assignment. Professional factors are larger issues that influence the teaching profession, such as teacher standards or possibilities for advancement. Personal issues involve the multiple other roles that teachers inhabit outside of work: parenting, elder-care, pets, clubs, church, sports, and others.
An unexamined life is not worth living.
Socrates
Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” If we get up, go to work, go to sleep, rinse and repeat every day without thinking about what we seek to achieve, we are bound to climb the wrong ladder with each rung taking us further from what would ultimately bring us happiness. I cannot make teachers happier, but I can ensure that the myth of the heroic teacher who lives in the teacher workroom and singly reaches the heart of every child is not an obstacle to that happiness. My car is not in the parking lot, because it’s blazing a path for others to follow in attaining their personal vision.
References
Dagli, A. and Baysal, N. (2017). “Investigating teachers’ life satisfaction”. Universal Journal of Educational Research, 5(7). https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1147811.pdf
Viac, C. and Fraser, P. (2020). “Teachers’ well-being: A framework for data collection and analysis”. OECD Education Working Papers, 213. https://doi.org/10.1787/c36fc9d3-en.
