Breathe!

Based on nearly every interaction I have had with a human being in the last two weeks, I’d conclude that February is a terribly abusive month. Thank goodness it’s over. In schools, especially, stress is thriving. Students are getting antsy and are feeling the academic and personal pressures that always come with the spring semester when they’re ready for everything to be over but can’t quite see the still-distant end. The honeymoon period wore off months ago, and now students and staff are wondering if divorce is an option. Teachers seem buried in mounds of grading and paperwork. Open house, field trips, TELPAS samples, make-up work from illness outbreaks, required professional development, and oppressive pollen counts have turned normally cheerful and upbeat teachers into grumpy zombies. At an Ed Camp event last week in our district, the most highly attended session--with standing-room-only crowds of teachers spilling out into the hallway outside the packed room--was the one on Stress and Teacher Self Care.  Staff, students, paraprofessionals, and administrators all seem to be competing against one another in a giant game of Wheel of Unfortunate. Everyone is overwhelmed.

It’s time for us all to take a moment to breathe. Stop what you’re doing. Forget about the e-mails, the voicemails, the stack of papers to grade, the lesson plans, and the disciplinary referrals. Don’t worry about your to-do list. It’ll get done. Just breathe. Breathe deeply. Close your eyes if you’d like (though that’s going to make reading the rest of this a bit of a challenge). Try doing nothing but concentrating on your breath for a full minute. When you’ve mastered that, try two. Think of it as a service project; you’re creating carbon dioxide for the plants and flowers that are trying get us out of this wintery, brown funk. Relax your jaw. Let the tension out of your forehead. Simply breathe.

There. Feel any better yet? Sometimes, taking that time to slow down and take care of ourselves by filling our needy cells with restorative oxygen makes tensions seem less tense.

The O in AVID’s WICOR acronym stands for organization. We teach our students to organize many things: their binders, their time, their study routines, their writing. Isn’t it equally important for us to teach them to organize the clutter that is swirling around in their brains and causing stress and tension? Organizing one’s inner life may even be more important than organizing one’s exterior self because once we are facing the world calmly, we can put things into perspective much more clearly and focus on what needs to be accomplished.

Consider what you can do to help students calm the turmoil in their lives. For one thing, you can begin by acknowledging and normalizing the stress they are feeling. So often we feel that we are alone in our feelings and that everyone else must be navigating life much more skillfully than we are. Maybe my opening paragraph above made you feel better knowing that the stress you are feeling right now isn’t atypical. Talking about stress and anxiety and allowing your students to talk about them lets students know they aren’t alone.

We shouldn’t stop, though, with merely acknowledging the existence of stress. The next step is to teach some ways to cope. One of the easiest, as you may have realized, is breathing. On days of particularly stressful tests and exams, I often asked my students to take a moment at the start of class to breathe together, to slow down, to clear their minds of stress, and to tell themselves that they could succeed. I shared my confidence in them and asked them to believe in themselves. The change in the stress level in the room was palpable. Students went into the test with a newfound tranquility and renewed focus. I don’t have empirical data to prove that their test scores improved, but I think my students would tell you that the extra oxygen helped them think a little more clearly.

I think it’s so important that we, in our highly influential roles as educators, provide our students with every tool for success in life. The ability to recognize their emotional stressors and to try to combat them is a skill that will help them forevermore. We need to remember, though, that it’s tough for us to teach what we don’t practice ourselves.

It’s really hard to teach self-care, however, if we don’t practice it. Before we can extol the virtues of stress management, physical activity, getting plenty of sleep, downtime, adequate nutrition, and positive peer relationships, we need to experience those ourselves.

With Spring Break looming just around the corner, I invite you to take some time to recharge yourself. Leave your work stresses behind for a week and practice self-care. Breathe a lot. And even when the break has ended and it’s time to return to school, continue to take care of yourself as needed so you can be the best you can be for your students. They need you more than they will ever admit.

And don’t forget to breathe.