Need To Make Teaching Less Stressful

All careers are challenging if they are not taken seriously. Every job is tough until we gather necessary skills and enough experience to perform it. In the job market, teaching is becoming the most stressful career. There are, of course, pretty good reasons why teaching is superior to any careers. However, there are often times when teachers are forced to update with changing curriculums, teaching guidelines and educational standards set by the government. They are always in a consistent engagement of reworking, rewriting and re-submitting the lesson plans. They are expected to spend a lot of time in the professional skill development like trainings and seminars. 

The pedagogical archetypes assume teaching as easy job. Many cinemas made on teachers present them as someone engaged in very simple job. Most of the movies depict teachers either as dictators or funny persons. Rather than projecting teachers as ideal persons and intellectuals, they are made fun for awkward fashions, queer expressions, abnormal behaviours, typical gestures and so on. Cinemas sometimes portray teachers as students’ enemies. Highlighting a very few common events of teaching, an impression is formed that anyone can teach. Efforts to make students understand the lessons are overshadowed. Script writers and movie directors never accommodate scenes that pay respect to teachers who spend hours to plan and create conducive environment to learning. Teachers sometimes spend their own pocket money to buy teaching aids to facilitate teaching-learning activities. They carefully manage the composition of classroom diversity standing above all prejudices. Despite innumerable challenges, teachers smile hiding their pains.

Stressful occupation

A key concern of a teacher is to make effective presentation. What matters in teaching is teacher’s voice that includes rich content, modulation of sound, the rate of speech, delivery technique, and proximity with students. Teachers are evaluated every day. They should act like they are happy, confident, fearless and controlling whatever is their individual situation. Monster Career Advice Newsletter depicts that 42 per cent people suffer from speech phobia. As teachers are everyday presenters, they also silently suffer irrational fear. Kimberly A. Schonert Reichl claims that teachers are certainly at risk and therefore they are in a constant struggle to suppress their phobia inwardly. Discouraging working colleagues, tight administrative bodies, harassing students and many other socio-political factors push teachers to neurosis anxiety.

Research shows that teaching is a most stressful occupation. University graduates at their late 20s or early 30s want to become teachers. After three-four years in the classrooms, however, they are no longer certain that they would have emotional stamina to continue this occupation. The reason central to this tendency is teachers suffer from many obstacles. They lose their heroism of teaching before they gather enough experience. There are numbers of factors that weaken teachers’ heightened spirit of strengthening students. Milbrey Wallin McLaughlin, R. Scott Pfeifer, Deborah Swanson-Owens and Sylvia Yee claim that the conditions under which teachers carry out their responsibility are often set up in such a way as to deny them a sense of efficacy, success and self-worth. 

Many teachers feel that the hardest part of teaching is the stress of trying to deal with a large number of students in a classroom. Effective teaching requires that teachers can satisfy each student’s emotional need. But they have not been able to reach every student. Making teachers teach more than 20 students in a classroom is to disregard their psychological burden. Teachers are also panicked by everyday administrative interferences that undermine their competence. The administrative decisions are motivated by market forces and ignore the teachers’ problems in the classrooms. The administrators’ indifference to this subtle aspect related to teachers’ psychology makes teaching stressful. The disturbing administrative decisions thwart teachers from their roles as classroom managers and undercut their expertise. 

The surveillance of CCTV camera discourages informal environment and peer learning. It forces the teachers to shrink their teaching to formal performance. Technology should facilitate teaching rather than terrorising tutors and learners. The pathological symptom of teachers is that they take teaching as a difficult occupation because it lacks incentives. The society regards them as unimportant and they are low-paid workers.  It is a major indicator that shows lack of respect to the occupation. Easy hire and similar lay off reduces teachers to mere substitutes and makes their career uncertain.

Occupational stress definitely affects productivity. As managing stress is related to addressing psychological needs, it has to be elevated with positive self-concept.  Anthony C. Riccio points out that positive concept of the self can be the best way to cope with the stress of teaching.  She states that the doctoral dissertation written at Ohio University by Blough (1980) and Nusbaum (1982) revealed that educators who viewed themselves more positively perceived less stress than did the educators with less positive concepts of the self.

Motivation

Enough preparation of the content to deliver in the classroom makes a teacher confident. If a teacher plans to utilise every minute of his/her classroom, this keeps stress away. Good teachers are fully prepared even to teach junior graders. They manage motivating teaching materials to not let students’ attention scatter from the content of the lesson. They should give students an impression that they are hardworking and devoted to help students at their best. Teachers should never seek to gain support from anyone except students and academics. Nothing else can satisfy a teacher more than helping students meet their educational needs. 

Teachers’ attachment with political forces may help them achieve political posts, but it cannot sharpen their teaching excellence. In spite of all attempts made to tackle with stress, all teachers must have their health insurance so that they can consult medication before the case is severe. As the chances of their health risks are high, the government should set up separate hospitals to ensure their health safety. It is not a populist plan to establish a separate hospital for civil servants and teachers.

(Dahal is an Associate Professor at Tribhuvan University.)