Who Are You When School Is Closed?

I was a young teacher on a small island. Population small enough that running into your students at the grocery store, the beach, or literally anywhere else on a Saturday was not a possibility — it was a certainty. There was no clean separation between teacher-mode and not-teacher-mode, because the geography didn't allow for one.

The dean of the upper school at my school had a rule she lived by and passed on: When you leave, you leave. No grading at home. No emails. Nothing from school crosses the threshold. You separate, completely, and you protect that separation the way you'd protect anything else that keeps you functional.

I heard her. I admired it. I did not, for a long time, actually do it.

I was in my mid-twenties. Teaching felt like the most important thing I'd ever done. The students were real to me in a way that made it very hard to put them down at the end of the day. I stayed in lesson-planning mode while walking to the store. I ran through the week's harder conversations on the drive home from school (OK, so it was on an island where the drive is about five minutes). The job was not something I did. It was, for a while, something I was.

Most committed teachers will recognize some version of this. It tends to get celebrated — the passion, the dedication, the teacher who is always thinking about their students. What gets less attention is what it costs, and what it quietly prevents.

– THE REALITY

Teacher professional identity — the degree to which your sense of self is organized around being a teacher — has a genuinely protective dimension. Research consistently shows that teachers with a strong sense of professional identity have higher work engagement, greater job satisfaction, and more resilience in the face of professional difficulty. Caring deeply is not a liability. It is, in most ways, an asset.

But the same research also documents a less-discussed pattern: high professional identification can become a risk factor as well as a protective one. Teachers who are deeply committed to their professional identity are more vulnerable to burnout when role demands are unclear, when what is expected of them outweighs the support available, or when the gap between the teacher they want to be and the conditions they're actually working in becomes too wide to bridge. The very thing that makes you good at this — how much it matters to you — is also what makes the hard parts hit harder.

There is a subtler version of this worth naming. When a student refuses to engage. When a class goes sideways. When a parent is hostile. When a colleague dismisses something you worked hard on. For teachers whose identity is tightly fused to the professional role, these events land differently than professional frustrations usually do. Because if you are a teacher, fundamentally and completely, then a student who won't engage today isn't just a classroom challenge. It becomes a referendum on you — on whether you are good enough at the thing you are.

– THE SHIFT

This is not a "care less" argument. Not "leave it at the door" or "find better work-life balance" — both phrases that teachers in genuinely difficult circumstances tend to experience as dismissals of the real weight of what they're carrying.

The shift is more specific: having a robust identity outside of teaching is not a betrayal of your commitment to students. It is one of the most important things you can do for them.

Research on psychological detachment from work — the ability to mentally step out of the professional role during non-work hours — is consistent across professions and particularly well-studied in teachers: detachment is one of the strongest known buffers against emotional exhaustion and one of the clearest predictors of next-day energy and engagement. Teachers who can access full lives outside of school don't love their students less. They show up with more to give.

Brené Brown's work captures something related in what she calls the "lock-through" process — the idea that transitions between work and home require an intentional shift, not just a change in location. In a recent Dare to Lead episode, she uses the metaphor of a boat lock to explore how we navigate the professional-to-personal transition: moving too fast through it, without any deliberate ritual of release, tends to result in carrying one world into the other without realizing it. The end-of-day commute spent on your phone in the parking lot rather than going inside — that's the version most teachers recognize. The work isn't done. It just relocated.

A deliberate transition ritual — something specific, repeated, that signals to your nervous system that the role is being set down — is not self-indulgence. It's a functional tool for recovery. And the research on teacher recovery is clear that the quality of psychological detachment during off hours directly predicts professional functioning the following day.

The teacher who has something that is entirely theirs — a creative practice, a physical pursuit, a relationship, an intellectual curiosity that has nothing to do with curriculum — is not less committed. They are more sustainable.

– MAPPING YOUR NON-TEACHER SELF

Please don’t approach this as another checklist. It's a genuine inquiry worth taking seriously.

Part 1: Who were you before you were a teacher?

Not your background or credentials. Who were you? What did you care about before you had a lesson to plan? What activities made you lose track of time in a way that had nothing to do with students or school?

If you can answer this quickly and specifically, you have a foundation to work with.

If you're reaching for an answer and finding mostly "I've always wanted to teach" — that's worth sitting with. Not as a problem to diagnose, but as information about how thoroughly the identity fusion has happened.

Part 2: What exists in your current life that is genuinely not about work?

Be specific. Not "I try to relax on weekends" — a named thing, a named relationship, a named practice that is yours, that doesn't serve the school and doesn't need to, that you would want to keep even if you left teaching tomorrow.

If you can name three things: you have a life that isn't only work. Protect those things deliberately.

If you can name one, or none: that's not shameful. It's common. It's the natural result of a profession that expands to fill whatever you give it. It is also worth noticing — because when work is hard, and it will be hard, there is no other ground to stand on.

Part 3: Design a transition ritual — something small, specific, and yours.

The research is practical here: the transition between work and home benefits from a deliberate, repeated signal. Something that tells your nervous system that the professional role is being set down for now. This might be:

• A walk, even a short one, before you enter your home
• A specific playlist you listen to only on the drive or commute home
• A brief journal entry at the end of each school day — not about school, just about you
• A physical change (changing clothes, changing rooms) that marks the shift
• Five minutes of something completely unrelated before you do anything else at home

The specifics are yours to design. What matters is the deliberateness: a repeated, recognizable act that signals to yourself that the teacher hat is coming off, and that the person underneath it gets some time now.

Part 4: Identify one non-work identity to cultivate or reclaim.

Not the whole of who you were before teaching. One thing. Something small enough to start, meaningful enough to matter. A creative practice you dropped. A physical activity you used to love. A friendship that got crowded out by the school year. A curiosity you keep meaning to follow.

This isn't a productivity exercise. You're not trying to optimize your time off. You're trying to build a self that is bigger than the job — not because the job doesn't deserve your dedication, but because a self that is only the job has nowhere to go when the job gets hard.

THE CONNECTION TO THE STUDENTS WHO NEED THE MOST There is a direct line between this and the theme of our bulletin this week. The students who are hardest to teach — the ones who push back, who check out, who trigger your most frustrated or helpless feelings — will find the cracks in a professional identity that has no ground outside itself. When you have more of yourself than the teacher-self, you have more to draw on. You are less likely to experience a student's refusal as a verdict on you, because you know — in your bones, not just in your head — that you are not reducible to whether this particular student engaged today.

– THE HONEST PART

Building a non-work identity requires time, and time is the one thing most teachers feel they don't have. This is real. The evenings fill. The weekends become recovery from the week and preparation for the next one.

But the question worth sitting with honestly: is the absence of anything-that-isn't-work a necessary consequence of how demanding teaching is? Or is it partly a default — something that happened gradually, without ever consciously deciding that teaching would become the whole of your life?

And the honest answer doesn't require choosing between loving your work and having a life. It requires recognizing that you were a person before you were a teacher, and that person still deserves tending.

– YOUR MOVE

Write three things that you are, outside of school, that have nothing to do with teaching. They don't have to be impressive. They don't have to be things you do regularly. They just have to be real.

If you can't write three: write one. And then do that one thing this week and go back to being that part of yourself for a little while.

You'll go back to being a teacher on Monday. You'll be a better one for it.

What's one thing about yourself that has nothing to do with school? Drop it in the comments — this is one space where being a teacher is entirely optional.

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Note: This series provides professional frameworks for managing workplace stress and workload. It is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you are experiencing persistent feelings of hopelessness, severe anxiety, or physical symptoms, please consult a healthcare professional or mental health provider.

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This is part of Accingo's Sustainability Studio — making teaching a lifelong career.