Coping with Curmudgeonliness

You've received an attack from a parent or another teacher.

My husband says, "I'll bet no teacher goes unscathed." Even the teacher that is at school, available to students from 7:00-7:45am, lunch, and then again from 2:45-4:00pm - every day - has been chastised by a parent for "not being available for my child." Consider the teacher that has never once stepped foot in your classroom and yet has told other teachers that kids in your classroom "just have fun," and "there's no real learning happening." There may even be rumors about you that you hear through someone else. Teachers are not immune to attack. We have 60 or up to 300 or so parents who might not read what we send home, or might not talk with their children before they chat with us. We are in a culture where it seems people complain more publicly than they compliment. There are many variables that make people say what they do. We cannot control what happens in these people's lives. We cannot control what they say to or about us. We need to control our own thoughts about it, however, or our mental stress will manifest itself into physical stress. This physical pain or sickness can keep us out of school.

Here's what we CAN do:

Find someone at your school you can chat with on a regular basis. Be supportive for them, and they'll be there for you. No need to spend hours commiserating... just enough to know that you've both got some struggles in life. You're not alone, and you have many blessings for which to be grateful.

Turn to words. The red words in the Bible, the quotes from books you're (hopefully still) reading, your favorite bloggers, or just find inspiration online. Heck, I've even had a "quotes" column open on my Tweetdeck. You never know what you'll find there!

Go outside. Go for that walk, that bike ride, that lunch on a picnic table. In the winter, get out and get your cheeks and ears red. Get outside with the goal of getting some fresh air and sun.

Collect all the positive vibes you get - emails from parents, cards from students, quotes from great times in your classroom. Collect them so you can look through them when that one voice of many keeps crawling around trying to infect your thoughts.

And what else can we do? Ask other teachers! It's what I did!

Here are ideas curated from a session at EdCamp lake County on December 9, 2017 from about 40 or so teachers!

Our mental health is oh, so very important. Don't let a curmudgeon make you lose sight of what you're doing and why. Sure, we should re-evaluate what we're doing all the time, but once we regroup, we need to find ways to let it go...