He talked about the importance of being able to control the breathe and how what was inside us was a microcosm, with everything else out there being the macrocosm. When we learn to control ourselves - our breathe - then we may start to have a chance to have control over other things.
It made me think about the choices we make as teachers and the notion of professionalism. So often we feel 'done to', the analogy of FE as the Cinderella sector and the politicians 'play ground'. Like breathing, we take change for granted and this pace of change feels to keep speeding up, uncontrollably so. With so much change being imposed upon us & with the seemingly never ending increase of work to do, we are just too busy to stop and notice, never mind start to think about taking some control of it.
Taking a survey on work related stress today, the question that stood out for me was:
How many days a week do you take an uninterrupted break of more than 20 minutes (eg, without seeing students, preparing lessons, checking emails, etc)
the answer is: zero (although on occasional Tuesdays I have been know to have an actual tea break - but only since evening classes finished)
In my quest to recognise my work/life balance, and trying to take some control over my professionalism, I had been feeling quite accepting that I had a good balance. I felt that on the whole I arrived in, and left, work 'on time'. Experience has taught me that, if I need to work additional time in a week that I negotiate time in lieu for this within that week. Left any longer, this flexibility on my part will be 'forgotten' and the time would not be given back to me.
But this question in the survey has me re-thinking this. If you add up my time in work, minus the break time that we (by law?) are required to take, then I pretty much work my 33.5 contracted hours. However, take that break time out (because in reality it isn't taken), and add the 30 mins early I arrive into work most days, then suddenly I am working 37 hours.
Now, I don't think there would be a teacher anywhere that wouldn't admit to spending time at home marking. This seems to be an accepted part of the role and certainly something that I regularly do. It certainly isn't something I do every week, but when you have a class of 16 students (and this is a small class for many now) with assignments that average 30 mins to mark (and that's usually just the good ones), there's a full days work in marking per assignment.
The other 'work' activity I do at home is what would very probably be classed as CPD activity - the reading, the professional discussions on Twitter and Yammer. As with the marking, the amount of this I do varies but it is certainly not something whilst 'at work' but is certainly something that my employer benefits from, even if they don't recognise it.
Now, I have been told throughout my career that I have pretty good time management skills & I felt that it had been positively noted that I did a good job within my contracted hours. When asked how much work I do at home I usually say very little, which maybe says something about how I identify marking and CPD activity in terms of my job/profession. However, in my recent ponderings of my work/life balance I had been feeling that this had changed. Recently, when mentioned at work, it has felt more of a back handed compliment - a kind of 'how can you go home on time when I can't' and I have felt that there is a view that I don't pull my weight somehow.
My college has a 'Top Employee Award', where anyone in the college can nominate anyone else for being Awesome. Of course, in principle it's a nice idea. The more the college can do to recognise and reward staff the better & if this comes from peers then excellent. But looking at the (fairly long) list of nominees one month, it struck me that the names of the people I recognised were people who were known to put 200% into their job. They are the first in the office and the last out. Talk about the weekend is met with a rye smile as they say 'what weekend? I've so much marking.' Staff who have continued to 'work from home', while officially having called in sick (work-related stress maybe??)
It got me thinking about how there should be an Award for Efficiency. The buzz word of the moment is 'efficiency savings' so lets apply this to a working week. The Award would go to the staff who worked their contracted hours (only), took appropriate breaks (away from a desk, and even possibly away from the building!), didn't work from home - and still managed to do their job. In this kind of efficiency saving which aspects of the job could be cut?
But back to the breathe. The thing our bodies do, unconsciously. My tai chi teacher talks about the health benefits of the dao yin exercises, but you can't learn to control the breathe unless you first become aware of the breathe. Telling my partner this week about how I was feeling about my work/life balance, and that I thought I didn't do a lot of work at home, he gave a little snort and a sideways glance. I got defensive and said I wasn't unhappy with the amount of work I did at home - but maybe I am not as conscious of this as I think I am. I still have plenty of work to do to become aware of, and take control of, this & how this links to my view of myself as a professional and the boundaries of my professional practice.
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