Let’s imagine such a situation. You are a perfect EFL teacher. You love your job, you like the people you work with, you have a great family but you seem to finish every day thinking 'There just aren't enough hours to get everything I need to do done'. Sadly you would not be alone in these thoughts.
Two of the top causes of teacher stress are excessive hours and workload. Add to this many problems stemming from conflicts of interest between school and home.
Every time you are asked to do out-of-hours activities, it's not just your work diary that needs to be re-scheduled but also your personal life, often impacting upon the plans made by family and friends. Imbalance occurs when such long hours to meet an urgent deadline become the norm for a teacher.
Most of us, EFL teachers are women trying to man-age several different roles, whether it's mother, breadwinner, wife or occasional nurse. With 85% of care still falling to the woman (as does the washing, ironing, birthday cards...), over one in five of us also have to care for both our elders and children. In the work/life, balance is about productivity, prioritising, communicating Balance in your own life, by contrast, is more to do with finding time for yourself, developing relationships, building your own self-worth, self-belief and confidence In teaching, as in all professions, it cannot be denied that a woman's needs, skills and desires often drop to the bottom of the pile, get forgotten or go unnoticed. Therefore to avoid that and to create a work/life balance the following tips can be very helpful:
1. Think of your day as 24 hours. Make a schedule. Decide how much time you are going to spend sleeping, eating, being with family, working, leisure and time for 'me'. This isn’t always easy, but just to build up 10 minutes for yourself at first.
2. If you take work home, set times when you will deal with this and be strict about it. Don't get distracted and then allow the work to drag on all night/weekend. Make sure you have a 'stop time' so that you can relax.
3. Once you've built up on 10 minutes 'for me', try to spend 30 minutes just doing nothing. If you can.
4. Ban sticky notes from your desk. You'll be distracted and react to them, rather than completing anything.
5. Refuse to argue over small things. It's a waste of time to bicker and causes more stress in the end.
6. Above all - strike a balance: work out when you have to give 100% and when just 70% will be OK.
