I’ve been going through all my blog posts, fixing where images exploded into huge sizes and formatting got weird after I changed my site theme when I found this “gem” from September 2017: “3 Ideas for Inspiring Shared Gratitude in the Classroom.”
I cringed while reading it. Not because it’s badly written or because the ideas are wrong, but because I can see right through it now. I can see what I couldn’t admit then…I was drowning, and I’d convinced myself that if I just smiled harder, everything would be fine.
Then I remembered another post and checked the date on that one. “Teachers: Stop Martyring Yourselves!” November 2017.
Ten weeks. Four blog posts between them. That’s how long it took me to go from “I’m going to embody gratitude and be thankful for silly things!” to “Stop being a teacher martyr. Just STOP.”
What I Told Myself that September
The gratitude post is so earnest it hurts to read. I’m talking about being “very cheery on Monday mornings” and how students “groan when I enthusiastically greet them and wish them a happy Monday, but they smile, too.”
I wrote about wanting to create “shared gratitude experiences” and how I’d ask students what they were thankful for. I used phrases like “I’m grateful to be at a point in my life where I can focus on gratitude.”
Reading it now? I can hear the desperation under every exclamation point.
Because here’s what I didn’t write in that post.
The language school was down to just a few teachers. Student populations were dwindling fast. We were all teaching multiple levels simultaneously, and I’d already been laid off from my previous job for the same reason.
I don’t think I would have felt safe anywhere at that point. All the language schools in my area were in the same situation. It was 2017, after all. Not that now is any better.
The pace wasn’t as brutal as my last IEP, but the goal posts and the rules for getting there kept changing. New expectations, new ways to modify (lower) standards, new ways the job expanded without the resources to match. Lower and disappearing benefits.
And my students? They were stressed, too, overwhelmed even while dealing with their own impossible situations.
So I apparently decided the solution was to be relentlessly positive. For me and for them. I didn’t want them to have a miserable teacher. I tried to absorb their stress, convert my own panic into cheerfulness, and create this bubble where we could all pretend everything was okay.
What I Was Really Doing
I was martyring myself.
I was lighting myself on fire to keep my students warm, and that gratitude post reads like someone trying very hard not to notice the smell of burning.
The gratitude practice itself wasn’t fake. I genuinely believed in it. I still do, actually. Gratitude practices can be powerful tools for managing stress and maintaining perspective.
But I wasn’t using gratitude as a tool. I was using it as a survival mechanism. A way to tolerate a situation that shouldn’t have been tolerable.
I was performing happiness because I thought that’s what good teachers do, right? We’re supposed to project positivity no matter what and make the classroom a safe space by absorbing all the chaos ourselves.
And you know what? It probably worked. My students probably did feel better. The gratitude practice probably did help them.
But I was teaching them something I never intended…that teachers should sacrifice themselves for student comfort. That your own wellbeing doesn’t matter as long as everyone else feels okay. Hey, I’d had early training on that, being a woman.
What Changed in Ten Weeks
I don’t remember the exact moment it broke. I just know that by November, I was done. And I know that because it’s documented in that “stop martyring yourself” post.
In it, it’s easy to see that I was done performing…done pretending…and DONE convincing myself that if I just worked harder, cared more, smiled and bigger, everything would somehow magically become sustainable and true.
The November post comes off as angry to me now. I was finally being direct. I was telling teachers to stop martyring themselves, to stop working 6-8 hours a day on lesson plans, and to stop lighting themselves on fire.
I was saying the things I needed to hear in September and earlier but couldn’t admit yet.
Because here’s what I’ve finally figured out…you can’t gratitude-practice your way out of systemic problems. You can’t positive-think your way through an impossible workload. You can’t smile hard enough to make a broken situation whole.
I’ve realized it after reading those posts and recognizing that I’m STILL DOING IT NOW. When I’m being super positive, I’m at my worst. Every time.
The gratitude I talked about in that post and tried to personify back then wasn’t wrong. But it was treating the symptom instead of the disease.
What I Wish I’d Known Then
I wish I’d understood that my students didn’t need a teacher who was secretly falling apart while performing cheerfulness. They needed a teacher who was honest about when things were hard.
Not miserable-dumping-on-students honest. Not using-them-as-therapists honest. But real. “Yeah, this week is brutal. Let’s figure out how to get through it together” honest.
I wish I’d known that modeling self-sacrifice wasn’t truly helping them. That showing them how to set boundaries and acknowledge reality might have been more valuable than showing them how to smile through the pain.
I wish I’d been kinder to myself and given myself permission to admit that the job was unsustainable, that I was struggling, and that needing to leave didn’t make me weak or ungrateful or a bad teacher. And I did leave eventually…a year later.
If You’re Reading This and You See Yourself
If you’re performing happiness right now…if you’re white-knuckling through Monday mornings…if you’re telling yourself that gratitude practices will fix what’s fundamentally broken about your situation.
I see you. I was you. If I’m honest, I still am you.
And I’m not going to tell you that gratitude is bad or that positivity is fake or that you should quit your job tomorrow.
But I am going to ask you to pay attention to the difference between healthy practices that sustain you and survival mechanisms that let you tolerate the intolerable.
Gratitude practices are supposed to help you appreciate what’s good in your life. They’re not supposed to paper over what’s actively harming you.
If you’re using gratitude to convince yourself that an impossible situation is fine, that’s not gratitude. That’s denial with better PR.
Your students deserve a teacher who isn’t secretly falling apart. But more than that, you deserve a job that doesn’t require you to fall apart in the first place.
What Happened to That Teacher
I’m keeping the original gratitude post up. Not because I’m proud of it, but because it’s real. It’s a document of what teaching can do to you when you care too much and the system cares too little.
And because maybe someone needs to see that the teacher who wrote that desperate, earnest post about embodying gratitude went on to write the post about stopping the martyrdom.
That teacher survived. Left that job. Built something different.
You can too.
The gratitude practice helped me get through those ten weeks and all those weeks before I wrote it. But leaving is what saved me.
Know the difference.
Posts mentioned:
3 Ideas for Inspiring Shared Gratitude in the Classroom
Teachers: Stop Martyring Yourselves!
