The students captured in this photo have given permission for their faces to be shared.
I love throwing myself into the deep end. Since September, this meant becoming a full-time teacher with no previous teaching experience (not even a day of supply teaching) and taking on 120 students as the school’s sole Core French Teacher until the winter holidays.
I believe it’s thanks to these disciplined behaviours that I was able to have a successful first stint as a teacher.
I hope that others are able to apply some of these points to their lifestyle as they embark on a new career.
1. Question what you’re doing on the job
- Teachers are notorious for being animals of habit. Many of them don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, or they haven’t attempted to see if there’s a better way.
- Avoid letting your preconceived notions of your job start eating away at your time. Before you know it, your prep periods and lunches will disappear with what seems to be important work, but is actually busy work.
2. Scheduled sleep
- Be in bed for 9 hours, to attempt to get 8+ hours of sleep. 9 p.m. bed time, 6 a.m. wake up. I was more patient, enthusiastic, and enjoyed teaching more as a rested version of myself.
- No amount of lesson preparation would have made a lack of sleep worth staying up.
- Weekends were adjusted, but I woke up before 7:30 a.m. so that waking up on Monday morning wasn’t brutal. It’s surprising how much your circadian rhythm adjusts in just a week of sleep discipline.
3. Giving a heads up to friends and family
- Of course it’s going to be difficult to tell your friends you want to be home by 11 p.m. every Friday or Saturday night. That’s why I gave a heads up to my close friends and family that I anticipated to see over the upcoming few months that I was going to have to be very disciplined with my sleep if I was going to survive all of the lesson and activity planning.
- Only the people worth keeping around were understanding of this heads up. If they weren’t, it informed me that they didn’t have my best interest in mind, or a lot less than I previously thought.
4. Avoid taking on commitments outside of the job
- If I was to spread myself too thin, I wasn’t going to do either my job or any other commitments properly. For this reason, I said no to any commitments that weren’t urgent, or that wouldn’t harm anyone with my “no.”
5. Cook simple, healthy meals
- Unless cooking is therapeutic (which it is not for me), the purpose is to produce a nutritious meal that fuels your body and mind. I choose to find the most efficient way of doing so, without sacrificing the core purpose of food.
- I end up eating the same meal 2–3 days consecutively, cooking one large batch. I cook two meals at the same time, and alternate for lunch and dinner.
- Raw, whole foods are nutritious, and full of good taste if one eats them mindfully (i.e. without a screen in front of your face). No need to spend time cooking the same ingredient that you can already enjoy raw — you’re not adding nutritional value by cooking it in this case (you’re possibly retracting it).
- Legumes and various beans are very quick and nutritious for a vegetarian-based diet, which are my go-to ingredients for many meals.
- Used the money you save from eating very basic meals to go out to eat once a week, preferably on weekends to fully reap the benefit of dining out.
6. Schedule relaxation time, as opposed to work time
- As a new teacher, it is easy to get caught up in burning out by over-working yourself, since you actually are never fully prepared or have created enough activities in advance.
- It’s easy to schedule time to work after-hours in this case, but much more difficult to schedule time to do something unrelated to work, whether it be a personal passion or for your social self.
- I scheduled my personal time either before or after dinner, so that my mind wasn’t buzzing with ideas for work while I was trying to sleep.
- No need to over-indulge in this personal time — 1 hour a night can suffice.
- Use an agenda.
7. Work first, relax after
- Related to the previous point, it’s very difficult to relax if you’re thinking about the work you have to do right after your scheduled relaxation time. It’ll be a lot more enjoyable and deserving if you have done work first and then put your feet up.
8. Simplify your physical exercise
- Keeping a streamlined approach to exercise will increase adherence to exercising during a time when it’ll feel extremely difficult to stop working and get moving.
- If it’s simple, you’ll feel more inclined to do 15–20 minutes than if your workout demands 45–60 minutes, which might result in ditching exercise all together.
9. Meditation
- As many of my close friends and family know, I am a huge proponent of meditation because of the positive outcomes it has created in my life. More on that in an upcoming written piece.
- For now, I would say that meditation here is defined as time in the morning (first thing ideally) concentrating on the feeling of air passing in and out of one’s body.
- It’s important that you have quiet time to yourself, even if you’re lost in thought for the 5–10 minutes you allot to meditation. This helps you have a relatively clearer mind during your day, which helps you do a better job of whatever you are trying to do.
- I recommend trial of Headspace or Waking Up, both apps available on all mobile platforms. Message me for a free month of Waking Up — I personally use this app now after having used Headspace a few years ago.
