What can teachers do to avoid, or fight, burnout?
| Further reading Hi, my name is Lindsay Clandfield and I used to be an enthusiastic teacher. It sounds like the beginning of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, doesn’t it? But it’s true. When I started teaching I had very noble ideas about what I would do with students. I think back to those very first days of teaching, and the things I did. For example, I used to prepare grammar lessons (then we called them structure lessons) with care and great diligence. It took me ages, partly because I wrote all my instructions out by hand (after one trainer told me I had ‘a problem’ with instructions – she was right). At the time I was working two jobs, at a university and a high school. I used to do big projects with the high school students, putting posters and other projects they had made up on the wall (I even purchased the extra material for this with my own money). I organized singing in class with my university students (I can’t sing to save my life). We sang North American folk songs and t
