Skip to main content

Leaving Work at Work


As a teacher it's so hard not to grade at home. I know I won't be able to avoid it 100%, but this year I have made a promise to myself and family to leave work at work.

I am completing my grading at school so far. I am getting behind by a week and may have to break the promise I made a bit, but so far I have improved greatly in the time I used to spend grading. In the past, I would grade every. single. assignment.

Why?!
I worry so much about classroom management that I would grade everything: classwork and homework. Some teachers would have about eight assignments per six weeks grading period. I would have like 20+ (I would also include daily participation). By the end of the semester, I would have so many grades entered in. Since I took a year off of work for maternity leave, I now see that this was absolutely maddening.

I am also not going to check my email while I'm not at work. I cannot allow myself to check it because it does affect my mental health. The anxiety of there being a possible angry email from a parent would ruin my day (though I usually only get about one or two a year, knock on wood). I received my first angry letter from another coworker ever in my eight years in education. Luckily (or not?) I was not the only one.

I had many appointments I had to attend to today; it was unavoidable to refrain from taking the day off. I want so badly to check my email right now. I want to see if I got any reports on the day, if anyone needs anything. But I am not going to check it.

Back to that angry email I mentioned earlier...my coworker opened his email on Labor Day and it somewhat ruined his day off because he carried this extra worry with him. I didn't see my email until I went back to work. Had I opened the email on Labor Day too, I would have been sick with anxiety, ruining the time I had with my family.

I want to still check my work email, but I'm writing this instead, then forcing myself to go to bed. Work can wait.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Decluttering-Getting Rid of Facebook

I have a month left of maternity leave. To say that I'm overwhelmed is an understatement. I've spent the last year decluttering my house. I recently realized that I need to declutter my social media as well. I don't have a Twitter or Instagram. I only recently got a Snap Chat. I joined a decluttering group about a month ago. At first it was very helpful. I was glad to find other people who were on the same journey as I. I noticed a few shared blogs of their journeys. I thought that was a fantastic idea and shared three posts of my own. It was then announced that posting your own blog wouldn't be allowed. I panicked. I felt like I was in trouble, that I did something wrong. I am in a state right now where I am struggling postpartum so what some may have seen as not a big deal, was a big deal to me. I apologized for sharing my blog, trying to explain that my own posts would be too long so that's why I shared it. But I continued to panic, and with fight or flight, I...
1 comment
Read more

We Own Too Much Stuff

I borrowed this book, Life At Home in the Twenty-First Century a few weeks ago after reading about it in an article. It's an ethnography carried out by the Center of Everyday Lives of Families by UCLA. They observed 32 families in California and their findings were very interesting to me. I tried to talk to my husband about it and he questioned if this was a book that was aimed for people to get rid of their stuff. I explained to him that it's a collect of findings of families of today, and if historians were to look back at us now, this is the kind of reports they would make for the way we are living. Here are a few of the things I didn't know about prior and thought they were very intriguing: The majority of houses are child centered, with art and toys filling all spaces of the home Having a child in the home increased home possessions by 30% Parents expressed stress with the mess in their homes as well as not having time to clean Homeowners were unable to use thei...
Post a Comment
Read more

We're debt free! We Paid Off $39,000 of Debt in A Year and a Half!

$39,359.38 to be exact!      In 2016, I took a year of maternity leave which forced our household to rely on one income. This was a big life alerting moment as we were barely making it. After looking at minimalism stuff for inspiration  to declutter, eventually I was lead to Dave Ramsey, which let us to enroll in Financial Peace University. We are now debt free and also have completed baby step three, which is having an emergency fund. Here is what we owed: Couch- $710.05 My daughter's saxophone: $1324.30 Credit card #1: $2166.17 Credit card #2: $4,009.05 Credit card #3: $9,833.40 Car: $18,072.65 Braces for Our Teen: $3,243.76  Since November 2018, we have been debt free!  We do have a house payment, but we can finally breathe a little! If we can do it, so can you! Communication is important! Here's some tips from a former blog I wrote that on how we were able to get out of debt . And to update, we did finally cut our cable! Thanks for...
Post a Comment
Read more