Why I’m Starting This Blog (And Why We Need to Talk About Teacher Burnout)

Hi, I’m Sandy. I’ve been a teacher for over 20 years—primary, secondary, even at university level. These days, I teach high school. I’m a also a trained counsellor.

Teaching is a job I love.

Teaching is also a job I deeply struggle with.

If you’re a teacher, you probably know exactly what I mean. These two feelings—love and frustration—can exist side by side, every single day. Over the past two decades, I’ve considered quitting at least once a year. And yet, here I am—still in the classroom.

Why?

Because there’s nothing like sharing your passion with young minds and watching them come alive during a lesson. There’s no greater feeling than knowing your words, your time, your energy mattered. That you reached someone.

There’s also the joy of forming bonds with students and their families, the camaraderie among colleagues, and the shared understanding that we’re all in this together.

Yes, there are perks: the holidays, the long service leave, and the comfort of knowing that our work has purpose.

But there’s also the dark side.

Teaching is not for the faint-hearted. It’s an endurance sport. There are days when student misbehavior wears you down—or worse, when you're targeted and their parents back them instead of you. There are colleagues who judge rather than support. There are leaders who pile on work to pad their own portfolios, with little regard for what’s already on your plate.

Then there's the workload—a relentless, growing beast. Despite all the tech that’s supposed to make life easier, it often fails us at the worst times. We end up duplicating our work, chasing down lost data, redoing reports.

And we can’t forget the A word: administration.

Paperwork. Endless, soul-sapping paperwork. Forms for excursions, tracking student progress, reports, compliance documents, mandatory training, pointless professional development sessions, and staff meetings that test everyone’s ability to stay awake.

And then comes burnout.

Burnout has hit me hard—so hard, in fact, that one episode took me more than a year to recover from.

Teachers are beautiful, resilient people. We care. We show up. We go above and beyond. But we’re also human. And we’re burning out. Fast.

That’s why I’m starting this blog.

We talk a lot about student wellbeing—and rightly so—but teacher wellbeing is often ignored. Meanwhile, many of us are quietly leaving the profession, exhausted and depleted, while schools face staff shortages like never before.

This blog is my way of opening up the conversation. I want to share real talk, practical tips, insights from my work as a counsellor, and a few doses of motivation along the way. Most importantly, I want to build a space where teachers can support each other.

Because without teachers, society doesn’t work.

And teachers can’t keep pouring from an empty cup.