Teaching While Parenting: 3 Tips to Get Through Your Day

Teaching is a profession in which you are expected to give 110% of yourself all of the time. If you go to take a day off, you're reminded that "even the best sub is no substitute for you." It doesn't matter that you have diphtheria, your ox died, or your wagon axle broke. Your students need YOU. All the time. Every day.

Being a parent is another full-time job that expects all of you, all of the time. Society loves to remind parents that those babies are always watching, always learning, and "don't blink, mama, one day you're going to miss this." How then are teacher-parents to meet the expectations of both of these demanding yet fulfilling roles?

Set Reasonable Expectations

You're not going to get everything done in a day. You're just not. We have this idea that teachers (and parents) are these super-human beings who can get 72 hours' worth of work crammed into a 24 hour day. It's false.

At the beginning of your day, look at your to-do list that is five miles long and cut it down to five things. That's it. Five things. It can be two teaching things and three parenting things or vice versa. You can get five things done in a day. Anything beyond that is a bonus.

Prioritize Your Day

After settling on your five things for the day, decide which takes the highest priority. We cannot do all of the things all of the time. Multi-tasking might be a great buzzword, but science has shown us that multi-tasking does not actually occur; one task comes to the forefront, and others get placed on the backburner. As opposed to feeling like you have a million fires in your kitchen that all need attending at once, if you set your tasks in order of priority, you can truly focus and actually accomplish your task more quickly.

Start Your Passive Tasks First

This goes hand in hand with prioritizing. If two of your home tasks for the day are to get the dishes done and to get the floors vacuumed, start with the dishes first. They can run in the dishwasher while you're vacuuming. Allowing for passive activities to go one in the background can help move your day along more efficiently. The same thing goes for in the classroom. If you have a million grades to enter and a project to get started with your students, get your students working on their projects first, then move on to grading while they work independently.

Parenting and teaching are both extremely demanding of your time and energy. These tips certainly won't solve all of your problems, but sometimes it helps to have someone point out simple things for you to do to smooth out your day.