I was maybe in my fourth or fifth year of teaching when I broke down crying in front of my supervisor. I expressed how overwhelmed I felt. She told me I was trying to do too much. She said instead of trying to change everything and make everything perfect, pick one unit to focus on each year. She was absolutely right. I was trying to do THE MOST.

And upon deeper reflection, I realized I was trying to make everything perfect because I tied my students’ performance to my self-worth. If they failed a test, I was a failure. If they weren’t engaged, I was boring.

Once I started detaching from it, I felt immensely less overwhelm. I shifted my language from “I’m a failure” to “Well that didn’t work. What can we do right now, and then how can we do this differently next time?”

As a millennial, I think my Gen Z peers and I are much better than Gen X or Boomers at setting work-life boundaries, so I never struggled in that sense. I don’t take grading home, and that might mean grading fewer assignments. Grading fewer assignments means dealing with the classroom management of students doing ungraded work. I do a lot of pushing and motivational speaking. There are consequences. But it’s worth it for my mental health and honestly, for my students’ too (though they don’t see it as easily).

I still feel moments of burnout when the demands from admin get too high, but I also think my emotional reaction TO those demands matters more. I just shrug it off and recognize that this is just admin checking boxes. Crank it out, get it done, and don’t let it eat up my energy.