LAUGH
Normally, people working regular jobs can simply leave their desk and head to the bathroom whenever the need arises. Not so for teachers! Teachers are in charge of classrooms full of students who, no matter what age or grade level, must be supervised at all times. This makes it incredibly challenging to meet the basic need of using the restroom as soon as our bladder speaks up. Teachers rarely get a chance to get away when we really need to.
A recent TikTok video shows Miss Smith, a teacher practically begging another teacher to watch her class so she can pee and prevent another urinary tract infection. Teachers all know about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how that applies to our students, but what about teachers’ basic human needs?
Using the bathroom whenever we want is just one privilege teachers rarely get to enjoy. Here are some more things we wish we could do but often can’t.
1. Teachers can’t eat lunch.
Even if teachers don’t have the dreaded lunch duty, we are often using the bathroom (see above), making copies, grading papers, or any number of the hundreds of things teachers do all day every day. That leaves little time for us to sit and enjoy a meal. Instead, we find ourselves cramming food in our mouths between copies or setting a record for how fast we can eat a sandwich on our way to pick our kids up from recess.
2. Teachers can’t take water breaks.
Students get regular breaks to take sips from their water bottles or visit the water fountain, but that’s not so for teachers. Yes, teachers can keep a water bottle handy in the classroom, but what happens when our water bottle is empty and we need to take a quick break to hydrate? Any number of things, actually. Kids getting out of their seats, kids asking what the teacher is doing, and kids losing focus on what they should be doing, just to name a few. Who knew a simple water break could cause so much chaos?
3. Teachers can’t finish a lesson because of the never-ending interruptions.
Teachers are masters at adapting to interruptions. Usually, it’s a student preventing a teacher from completing a lesson, but it might also be a visit from admin, a barfing student, a telephone call from the school office, a fire drill, a tardy student – the list goes on and on. These things make it nearly impossible to finish our lessons for the day in the allotted time.
4. Teachers can’t have a quiet moment to breathe.
There is nothing quiet about a classroom and even when a teacher requires silence, students don’t usually get it. And a quiet break without students? Forget about it! Unless you count the times another teacher watches our class so we can take a two-minute run to the bathroom. Fortunately, it’s usually quiet in the bathroom!
5. Teachers can’t complete all tasks within working hours.
In a normal, healthy work environment, employees are given tasks and then also given adequate time to complete those tasks. Do teachers enjoy the same? Ha ha ha! Sure, teachers have the amazing ability to do six things at once while also listening to a student, sending an email, and solving the latest playground drama. Multitasking is one of the superpowers of teachers. Yet we still don’t have enough time in our paid work day to do everything administration, coworkers, parents, students, and everyone in the world expects us to do. Which leads to number six…
6. Teachers can’t get enough sleep.
Teachers know the value of a good night’s sleep because they preach it to parents and students, but we often can’t follow our own advice! Turns out, our work spills over into our personal lives pretty quickly, sucking up much of the time we have to rest. Until summer break, that is, when we try to catch up on the lack of sleep built up over the past ten months.
7. Teacher can’t sit down.
Except during those rare times teachers get to race to the bathroom, there is no time to sit down during the day. Teachers go from task to task, lesson to lesson, recess to recess, while getting many more than the recommended 10,000 steps per day. Sitting down is a luxury we just don’t have time for. Probably because we would fall asleep (see number six) if we sat for more than 60 seconds.
As teachers, we give up a lot for our students, from our time to our sleep to our freedom to use the bathroom. However, these are big asks. Administrators and policy makers should prioritize the humanity of the teachers on their staff, not cram our days so full that we can barely function.
