You know the age old tale of what it’s like to be a first, second or even third year teacher and all the hustle and grind that it is.  You get to work before 6 AM and you leave sometime after five or 6 PM and probably still have more papers to grade or lessons to plan once you get home and a lot to do on the weekends. And that’s just to keep your head above water.

As if those first years of teaching aren’t bad enough it’s as if the universe looked at me and said just wait. At the start of my fourth year of teaching I became a mother and everything changed.

Suddenly what had been my absolute top priority, which was teaching even above my marriage, sad to say it but true because I’m such a workhorse and so professionally focused, but motherhood shook the bedrock, if you will, of my priorities. And I had no clue how to deal with that when my identity had been so wrapped up in who I was as a teacher. 

And that is where this episode comes into...

 Welcome back to the Teacher Health series here at Teach On A Mission.  I'm so glad you decided to carve out some time to join me in this reflection and consideration of ways we can build up teachers and bring them a healthier lifestyle.

In last week's post, Part One of our Teacher Health series, I shared some details around the not-so-secret trend that's occurring in education today... teachers not entering the field in the first place and teachers leaving the field once they get there.

I believe that this exit of teachers en masse is largely due to the unsustainable, super-human pace that's necessary to be effective and a "good" teacher.

This week I'm going to start by sharing a little secret of mine.  One that, now that I think about it, I don't think I've even mentioned this to my husband.

*GASP*

It's not a dirty secret, per say, but it's one that reveals my flawed perception of the teaching field when I first entered it and, therefore, the larger, collective...