Nobody Told You This Was Part of the Job

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People think teaching looks like this: you teach a lesson, students learn, you go home.

That's not Tuesday.

Tuesday is managing a kid's anxiety about her parents' divorce before first period. It's deescalating a fight between two students while simultaneously teaching fractions. It's a third-period disclosure that sends you straight to the office. It's a parent email about a B. Lunch duty. A kid shutting down in fifth period and you can't tell if it's the content or something happening at home. A meeting that eats your planning period. And then after school, a text to a colleague who's barely holding on.

That's one day. And none of it shows up in a lesson plan.

There's a name for this. It's called emotional labor—the ongoing work of managing not just your own emotions, but the emotions of everyone around you. Teachers do it constantly, often unconsciously, and almost always without acknowledgment. It's invisible to everyone outside the building. Which is part of why it's so exhausting. You can't point to it. You can't quantify it. You just feel it at 4pm when you have nothing left and you're not entirely sure why.

Here are three things worth trying.

Name it in the moment. When something emotionally heavy lands on you mid-day—a disclosure, a conflict, a parent email that stings—pause for just a second and silently name it. "That was emotional labor." You don't have to fix it or process it right then. Just acknowledge it happened. What you can name, you can manage. What stays unnamed just accumulates.

Build a transition ritual. The problem with emotional labor is that it doesn't clock out when you do. You need a small, consistent signal that tells your brain the workday is over. It could be a specific song on the drive home, a five-minute walk before you get in the car, or changing clothes the moment you walk in the door. The ritual itself doesn't matter. The consistency does.

Make it visible to someone. You don't need to justify your exhaustion to the whole world—but find one person (a colleague, a partner, a friend outside education) and occasionally say: "Here's what today actually looked like." Not to vent endlessly. Just to have a witness. Invisible work feels lighter when someone else can see it.

You did hard work today. All of it counts.