When I had started my career as a teacher, I used to imagine myself with a chalk and a duster, explaining concepts on the boards and scribbling along till my heart's fill. For the first eight months, that is exactly what I did. I filled the boards, had lively interactions with students, made student profiles in my head by studying their expressions and a lot more.
After these blissful eight months, the pandemic swept over us all. India went into an abrupt lockdown wherein I got only a few hours to pack my bags and leave the institution I was working for. There was a word looming over all of us - 'Online classes'.
Apart from the basic meaning of online classes, I wasn't familiar with anything else. I had neither attended one, nor taken one. For one thing I was absolutely sure of, I would no longer be using my favourite stationary and would no longer be able to insist on the teaching methods I grew accustomed with. We were given ten days to transition into the new norm. Ten days to familiarise ourselves with different interactive platforms available for remote teaching. Back then, I wasn't even sure of the internet bandwidth I needed to take an online class seamlessly. I ventured into the unknown, with nothing but my own grit.
Before I knew we all had moved into a virtual space where we were hidden behind black screens and muted mics. I slowly started forgetting the faces of my students although I had interacted with them for almost a year in a traditional classroom environment. It was all new and frustrating at the same time. Teaching without seeing faces, gauging expressions, talking to constantly muted black screens were becoming tiresome with each passing day.
This drastic shift brought about various other implicit challenges too. We had started exchanging contact numbers with students to facilitate easy communication, department meetings got scheduled outside school hours, students started texting and sending emails at odd hours. I found myself spending more time than ever on my laptop and my mobile. I was responding to relentless emails, student doubts, communication from the management, meeting with parents outside my work hours... There was a lot happening and very little time to learn and adapt. To add to these, I had also synced my email with all possible devices. Without my conscious knowledge I was being sucked into a world with more devices than people.
With all this happening at the work front, I also had to cook meals in between my classes. I used to plan out easy meals so that I could leave the kitchen premises soon and be glued to my screen. On most days I had my breakfast, lunch and tea in front of my laptop. I used to work on lessons/ mark attendance and eat meals simultaneously. I barely glanced at my food, I was mindlessly consuming whatever was on my plate.
I remember still, chewing on a piece of chilli like any other vegetable and learning a short while into it about the amount of ignorance with which I was eating.
Along with such an immense transgression of personal boundaries, I was seeing a large number of people talking about work and ranting about it on phone calls too. Before I knew, my work became as toxic as it could get. Most of us forgot that our job profile and the job itself doesn't define our life. It was a part and just a part of our life. The moment we let it define our self-worth we had chosen the spiral down of slavery.
And another trend of glorification emerged. If people received emails from colleagues late into the night, and work done before the deadline, the employee was lauded with praises and elevated into a pedestal of sincerity. Instead of adapting and making changes in our work-life balance, we were allowing our work to be our life. The frenzy of bragging about sleepless nights and timely work took over the entire workspace. What more to say, everyone got equally sucked in.
Another day, I heard my colleague saying "You know what, I slept only for three hours yesterday, when I woke up I realised that I had slept off on the answer scripts." More than an everyday conversation, this felt like a proclamation of the sincerity she was working to achieve. I felt horrified at the sheer abuse she was putting her body through. Three hours of sleep itself would be a nightmare for me. And if you did not reach your bed and 'passed-out' somewhere else, that itself is your body conversing with you.
Over time, burnouts became and every day term. Teachers seeking therapy due to work related stress became an everyday subject.
One year into such toxicity, I learnt to compartmentalise to preserve my sanity. First, I removed my work email from my phone, moved my workspace into another room. And refused to take calls post the said working hours. This helped me cut down on the amount of stress, and make more time for myself. Next came muting conversations post work hours, even that was done with much difficulty.
The urgency culture and glorified burnouts continue and is here to stay. It has helped people project their anxiety on the fellow employees and make a whole population suffer the reeling ill effects. On one hand I see this, and on the other I see healthy boundaries in work being perceived as lack of sincerity, laziness and rudeness. Well, the choice at the end of the day remains with us; whether to be 'polite' and lose out on our sanity, or be 'rude' and continue working with a smile.
I am still working to help myself maintain a healthy balance, and every day it is a climb.
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