HOW TO REDUCE THE STRESS OF TEACHING JOB IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Teaching Job is relatively stressful when compared to other white collar jobs. Regardless of what level of students you teach, being a teacher requires hard work, discipline, patience and high level of tolerance.
As a private secondary school teacher, I used to find it difficult to have time for myself when the school is on session. My diligent search for a way to reduce the stress of teaching earned me some discoveries which I will be sharing in this article. I believe practicing them will enable you to work smart as a teacher with lesser stress, thereby granting you the energy and time to do some side hustles that will earn you more money.
Below are the various activities that are very demanding and the ways to go about them efficiently and reducing stress.
1. Teaching students: A secondary school teacher is required to spend within the range of 6-8 teaching periods with students daily (with the exception of Fridays which ranges between 3-4 periods). This means that a teacher spend between 4-5 hours with students daily which entails talking, writing and standing. This process is always very tedious and stresses teachers.
To reduce the stress of teaching students, I recommend the following.
i. Encourage your students to read ahead: Give your students the scheme of work at the beginning of the term and encourage them to read ahead of every topic you are to teach. This will increase the rate of assimilation when you are eventually teaching the topic, thereby reducing the volume of talks required and also the amount of time needed to explain the topic. This idea however will work if your students have their personal textbooks and also have a good reading habits.
ii. Encourage your students to use online tutorials: There a quite a number of learning platforms where your students can access video contents of various topics especially for science students. This includes ulesson and various youTube channels. So instead of them wasting their data on social Medias, they can channel it to learning. Doing this will also reduce your stress as a Teacher
2. Setting examination questions: This one of the most stressful part of my teaching experience. It requires you browsing through different textbooks and past questions which is either WAEC or BECE past questions depending on the class you teach to locate questions of interest to you. After these, you are expected to write all the questions and submit to your school authority for typing. Some schools even request that their teachers should be responsible for typing the questions. Preparation of examination question always cause sleepless night for teachers as there are always deadlines for submission.
The following are the ways to prepare examination questions for secondary school students without stress.
i. Checking through CBT websites: many Teachers uses online cbt platforms to prepare examination question. Though this requires browsing through various past questions questions online to select the topics of interest, the only advantage over using past questions is that you can copy and paste the questions which prevents the stress of typing questions.
ii. Use teachersaid.ng: As a teacher, this is so far the most stress- free way of preparing examination questions. On the website, you can access WAEC questions on any topic of interest in the Nigerian secondary school syllabus. All you need to do is to select the topic, type the number of questions you want and you get the questions instantly. You can then download the questions you have generated either as word document or PDF which eradicates the stress of typing questions as a teacher.
3. Writing of lesson notes and plans: This is another stressful routine in teaching job. Some school demand that their teachers write both lesson notes and plan while others requires only lesson notes. Whatever case you find yourself, you can reduce the stress of writing by keeping the previous lesson notes you have used. You can always copy new lesson notes from old ones. However, this is only applicable to schools where lesson notes are collected from teachers at the end of the term.

Source: https://teachersaid.ng/

Nice one op.

Setting of examination questions is the only stressful one for me as I don't prep lesson notes because I'm a part-time Teacher.

Encouraging pupils to read ahead of you can only work with Serious students but not the lazybones we have these days who find it difficult to even do their homework.

Nice piece.

Thanks.

If you teach senior secondary school students, make use of https://teachersaid.ng/ and thank me later. The website has sorted waec past questions into topics and subtopics. You are just to choose the topic you want and the website gives you questions on them

Also for lesson note, a lot of teachers uses passnownow website. I haven't tried it though but I know a teacher that uses it