You might think that you’ve tried everything to boost your wellbeing at school, but primary teacher Lisa Jarmin has one more suggestion for getting you through the really tough days: crank up the speakers on your interactive whiteboard and blast Daniel Bedingfield’s Gotta Get Thru This around your room.
OK, so it’s not going to make that pile of marking disappear and it’s not going to make little Jimmy any more likely to stay in his seat for the duration of a lesson - but it might just make you feel a teensy bit better.
And if Daniel Bedingfield isn’t your idea of a good time, don’t worry; Jarmin has plenty of other suggestions, which she is sharing as part of our #TesWellbeingWeek.
Every teacher needs a top-notch motivational playlist, Jarmin says.
“Mine includes an eclectic bunch of artists, from Sigur Rós (‘Everybody lie down and meditate. Ms Jarmin’s got a headache’) to Village People - because making your class do the dance to YMCA as they tidy up is always entertaining, especially if you all wear hats from the dressing-up box for the duration,” she writes.
Amongst Jarmin’s other playlist picks are such bangers as the Kaiser Chiefs’ Every Day I Love You Less and Less - for when your class are really testing your affection for them - and Unbelievable by EMF, to perfectly encapsulate your feelings for the teacher in the room next to yours, who seems to do almost no work yet has managed to “con the head into believing that she’s God’s gift to teaching”.
But what if the tunes just aren’t cutting it? Perhaps what you need is really practical advice about how to get your work-life balance back on track in the new year.
Deputy head Aidan Severs knows from experience how tough it can be to strike that balance. For #TesWellbeingWeek, he explains how he finally realised what was at the root of his struggles with the job: overcommitment.
This is a problem that many teachers face, Severs believes.
“Most teachers will have extras that sneak in, build up and become all-consuming. We are, as a profession, so willing to volunteer and take more on. But those little things add up,” he writes. “There are only 24 hours in a day and there is only so much a brain can take. Something had to give.”
So what did Severs do to improve things? Simple: he taught himself to say “no”.
“I set myself rules. This meant that, whatever the request, the answer would be the same, and I would not have weak moments when I said ‘yes’ and regretted it, or spend time endlessly deliberating,” he writes.
Teachers aren’t able to say “no” to everything, of course (it wouldn’t exactly go down well with senior leadership if you refused to attend parents’ evening).
However, when it came to all those little non-essential extras, Severs found it easier to get out of things than he thought.
“You may be surprised at how well just saying ‘no’ is taken by the person asking: rarely are they offended, and most people understand,” he writes.
