Create a Teaching Life You Don’t Need to Escape From

“Your life outside teaching is not simply where you recover so you can teach again.” — The Quiet Teacher

Teachers are very good at counting down. By Wednesday, thoughts can already be turning towards Friday. By the middle of term, someone has usually worked out exactly how many teaching days remain until the holidays. Sometimes the countdown is light-hearted, shared over lunch or written on a staffroom whiteboard, and sometimes it comes from a much deeper place of exhaustion. Simply knowing that a break is coming can be what makes a particularly difficult stretch feel manageable.

There is nothing wrong with looking forward to a holiday. Anticipation is part of the pleasure, and when life is genuinely demanding, having a period of rest ahead can make an enormous difference. But there is something worth noticing about how easily looking forward to the next break can become a way of living. Friday brings relief, then Monday comes around again. A new term begins and almost immediately the next holiday appears somewhere on the horizon.

Teaching makes this particularly easy because the year is already divided into neat little sections.

We move from weekend to weekend, term to term, holiday to holiday, always with another finish line in sight. Outside school, the same habit can appear in different forms. Life will be better when work settles down, when there is more time, when the mortgage is smaller, when the children are older, when the trip finally happens or when retirement arrives.

The problem is that life has an inconvenient habit of happening while we're waiting for it to begin.

Most of a life isn't made up of holidays, milestones or extraordinary experiences. It's made up of ordinary Wednesdays: the drive home, making dinner, talking to someone you love, walking the dog, putting washing away, reading before bed and getting up the next morning to do much of it again. These moments can easily become the bits to get through before reaching the good parts.

Yet added together, they are not the space between our lives.

They are our lives.

Happiness in an ordinary week

Happiness can be an unhelpful word if it suggests that a good life should feel good all the time. There will always be difficult days, disappointment, boredom, stress and periods when getting through the week really is enough. A teacher dealing with an unreasonable workload or a difficult workplace does not need to be told to look on the bright side.

Research into wellbeing also gives us a much broader understanding of happiness than simply feeling cheerful. Positive psychology has explored the contribution of positive emotion alongside things such as engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. Other wellbeing research has emphasised autonomy, connection and personal growth. A satisfying life can contain difficult emotions and difficult circumstances while still containing things that give us pleasure, interest, connection and a sense that our lives matter.

This changes the question slightly. Rather than trying to make every day happy, we can think about whether enough of what makes life enjoyable is finding its way into our ordinary days. Perhaps this is also part of teacher wellbeing that we don't talk about enough: not simply how well we cope with teaching, but how much of ourselves and our lives remain outside it. Teaching can make this difficult because there is almost always something else that could be done.

Another resource could be prepared, an email answered, a lesson improved or tomorrow made slightly easier with another half-hour of work tonight. None of these choices seems particularly significant on its own. The problem comes when they repeatedly take the time and energy that might otherwise have gone somewhere else.

Eventually, life outside school can start to serve a very particular purpose: recovery. Evenings are spent recovering enough to go back tomorrow. Weekends are spent recovering from the week while catching up on everything that didn't happen during it. Holidays arrive and the first few days may be needed simply to feel normal again.

It is worth asking whether this is what we want from the largest part of our lives.

Our lives outside teaching are not simply recovery periods that allow us to return to work and perform well again. The things we do outside school do not need to justify themselves by making us calmer, more productive or more resilient teachers. They matter because this is our life too.

An evening walk does not have to improve tomorrow's teaching. Dinner with someone we love does not need to be described as self-care. Reading a novel, gardening, swimming, making something, going to yoga or sitting outside with a cup of tea does not need to restore us for Monday.

Sometimes it is enough that we enjoy it.

What makes an ordinary day feel good?

This is where happiness becomes personal. There is no ideal routine that will make an ordinary week satisfying for everyone. Some people want to come home to a busy house and conversation; others need quiet before they can think about speaking to anybody. One person might look forward to an evening class while another wants nothing more than comfortable clothes, dinner and a book.

The useful question is not what a happy life is supposed to look like, but what actually makes your own life feel good to live.

It may help to think about the ordinary days that already feel better than others. What is different about them? Perhaps there is enough time in the morning not to rush. Maybe there is something enjoyable planned after work, or dinner is eaten outside, or there is half an hour before bed to read. Perhaps the best evenings are simply the ones when school has not followed you home in your thoughts.

These things can look insignificant compared with the responsibilities competing for our attention. They are easy to postpone because very few enjoyable things come with deadlines. Work needs to be finished. Groceries need to be bought. Children need to be collected. Nobody sends a reminder saying that it has been three weeks since you did something purely because you liked doing it.

So the enjoyable parts of life can slowly become the optional parts.

This is not an argument for filling every evening with activities. A life we enjoy might actually contain less. More unhurried time, fewer commitments and the freedom to decide what to do with an evening when it arrives may be exactly what has been missing. Rest itself can be enjoyable when it is chosen rather than something we collapse into because there is nothing left.

The point is simply to notice whether the things that make life feel like your life still have somewhere to exist.

Sometimes making room for them requires surprisingly small decisions. Leaving school when there is still something unfinished. Deciding an email can wait. Protecting part of the weekend rather than automatically giving it to preparation. Returning to something that disappeared when life became busy.

At other times, the answer may be harder to ignore. If there is consistently no time or energy left for anything beyond work and recovery, it may not be an evening routine that needs adjusting. Something larger may need to change. That might eventually mean different boundaries, fewer hours, another school, a different role or something else entirely.

There is no need to turn every period of unhappiness into a major life decision. Difficult seasons pass. But there is also no prize for spending years waiting for life to become enjoyable again.

Before Friday arrives

Friday will probably always feel different from Monday. Holidays will still be exciting, and there will be terms when counting down the days is entirely understandable. Creating a life you don't need to escape from does not mean trying to make every Tuesday wonderful.

It means making sure Tuesday contains some of your life too.

If most of the week feels like something to endure before reaching the weekend, it may be worth noticing what has disappeared from those ordinary days. Maybe there is something that needs to return. Maybe work needs to take a little less. Maybe there needs to be more time in which nothing useful is happening at all.

Happiness is unlikely to arrive one day as a finished state, once work is finally manageable and every other part of life has fallen neatly into place. There will always be something unfinished, uncertain or inconvenient.

So perhaps the better place to begin is much closer to home: with an ordinary week, as it is now, and the question of what would make more of it genuinely enjoyable to live.

The next holiday will still be wonderful when it arrives. But there are a lot of ordinary Tuesdays between now and then.

They deserve some of your life too.

Further Reading

• Why Work–Life Balance Feels So Hard for Teachers

  Explore why teaching so easily spills into evenings, weekends and mental space — and why creating a healthier balance requires more than simply managing your time better.

• 5 Signs You Have Boundary Issues in Teaching

  Notice the subtle ways teaching may be taking more of your time, energy and emotional capacity than you realise, and begin gently reclaiming some space for yourself.

• Out of Sync, Not Broken: Rethinking Teacher Burnout in a Demanding System

  A different way of looking at teacher burnout — not simply as something within you that needs fixing, but as a possible sign that the demands around you are no longer aligned with what you need.

🌿 If these reflections resonated with you, you can subscribe to The Quiet Teacher for calm reminders, thoughtful reflections, and gentle support for sustainable teaching.

→ Join quietly here.

With joy,

Liz 💛

The Quiet Teacher