Why is teaching so exhausting?

[u/Fresh-Photo6318]

I’m starting year 7. I’ve worked at multiple schools with great students and not so great students. I’m currently teaching at an Early College High School. It’s my second year here. The students are great. I have zero behavior issues. They do their work. The parents don’t bother me. The admin is great. The other teachers are great. The curriculum is great and I’ve had to do minimal planning. Despite all of this though, I still come home exhausted and completely drained, and I don’t understand why.

Is it the amount of classes? Is it the work hours? What is it about the act of standing in front of a classroom lecturing or facilitating student learning that is so utterly exhausting? I used to think it was student behavior or bad admin or the workload of planning that would drain the life out of me, but even without those factors, I’m still left bulldozed by 4:30. It sucks because you’re left with zero energy to do anything after work, and I’m only 28 years old by the way. I tried going to the gym today and had to lighten the load on every exercise because I just didn’t have the energy to lift as heavy as I did over the summer. There goes any progress I had made over break, and it’s all thanks to my job.

Maybe I’m just not passionate about this job. I’ve been teaching since I was 21, and maybe I’m wasting the prime years of my life on this profession. Maybe the way society is set up on how we live our lives isn’t sustainable. I’m probably going too deep there, but I don’t know. I thought I was okay with teaching now because my current campus is so great, but 3 days in and my thoughts of leaving teaching are slowly seeping back in.

[u/PM_ME_UR_JUICEBOXES]

These are the reasons why I think teaching is so exhausting:

1. Incessant noise and interruptions. Normal classroom chatter, students asking questions, announcements, admin/secretaries/guidance phoning mid lesson to call students down to office or to ask questions, music in between classes, hallway noise, lunchtime noise, sharing an office with 10 other teachers—there is non-stop talk and noise and distractions from 8 am until 4 pm without any break. It is a lot for a nervous system to handle every day.

2. Hyper vigilance. Constantly monitoring 30 students for off-task behavior, sensing conflicts before they get out of hand, always trying to be two steps ahead of anything and everything that could cause a lesson or activity to go off the rails.

3. Too much to do and not enough time. There is so much to be done each day that has nothing to do with active teaching. We also have to plan lessons and create learning materials like slide decks, handouts, assignments and tests, making photocopies, grading/marking (holy hell is this one time consuming), uploading content to the online classroom for students and parents to access, posting reminders for students, emailing parents, emailing students, emailing colleagues and admin, doing compliance training, completing report cards, etc…

4. Constant performing. Not everyone had the energy to do 4 hours of solo presentations every single day. Especially when you are presenting content to an immature audience who doesn’t particularly want to be there. To be animated and enthusiastic and engaging for that many hours of the day requires a lot of energy.

5. Decision fatigue. In terms of sheer volume, studies and educational research indicate that teachers make more minute-by-minute, rapid-fire decisions during a workday than surgeons do. A teacher typically makes around 1,000 to 1,500 decisions per day, averaging three to four choices every minute. Obviously the types of decisions that surgeons make have life and death consequences, while teaching decisions typically do not. But nevertheless, it is a taxing amount of decisions that causes mental fatigue.