For my college professor colleagues, it’s midterm. It is therefore: the correction, the catching up, the planning, the beginning of the final straight line which swallows us up and spits us out – half unconscious, but also happy with the few successes snatched along the way – on the other side of the school calendar, the one which begins with vacation days or, as Normand Baillargeon said, convalescence days.
For me, it’s the Australian sun, a vacation planned for a long time, but which came a little too well following my burnout from last year.
It makes me think. Is there a way to be a teacher without being constantly overwhelmed? To have a life alongside teaching, to enjoy your daily life, to spend quality time with your family, and even — let’s dare to dream big — to love life? It makes me want to create a movement. The teachers who got burned once and who now demand a balanced life. Here is a sketch of his manifesto.
It’s time to take back possession of our lives, we, the teachers, the educators, the transmitters of hope and culture. We want to train the youth, but how can we take care of the youth if we are almost all on the edge of a burnoutin burnout or in remission from burnout ?
We want to leave a better life to our students, but how can we show them the way if we, their most visible and daily role models, cannot live a healthy, balanced, truly enviable and inspiring life?
We want to live in a world:
– where we are able to maintain links with our loved ones, our peers and our students — truly, constantly and without having to make up for “lost” time by working hard elsewhere;
– where we take the time to do our work well, but where we have enough free time to allow society as a whole to benefit from our talents, our expertise and our creativity;
– where taking a day off to go get a massage is encouraged;
– where teachers are free to break the stupid rules of “you are not allowed to leave Quebec during the Christmas holidays because we want you to be as unhappy and as bland as us, the bureaucrats in ties full of potatoes”;
– where teachers have time to deviate from the lesson plan and lead a discussion with students on current events, current films, their readings, the thoughts that animate them and the works that make them dream when all the class has had enough of Kant and his categorical imperatives;
– where teachers have the right to cancel classes at the end of the session, when everyone is tongue-tied, keeping themselves alive thanks to three or four cans of Monster and is tempted to use ChatGPT to bargain a little respite in a society that is only accelerating.
We want to live in a world that knows how to take time. Who does not suffocate in the overly rigid frameworks imagined by our executives. Who prefers life to productivity. Who is driven by the desire to do well, even if he cannot do everything.
This is my manifesto. That I have time to write because I knew how to tire myself out long enough in front of a class to afford myself a moment of respite.