Introducing Burnt Out Educator (0)

Welcome to the Burnt Out Educator 

Meet Ryan Savage

• The Burnt Out Educator
• Current Executive Director of Beyond Healing Center
• Retired/Resigned Educator
• This podcast is about revealing the human in the 7th-grade girl’s basketball coach putting in many hours for practice, traveling, and games – all while sacrificing those hours in their personal life.

“I made these concessions of the things that felt good to me or that I wanted to pursue, but found these barriers inside education… There were portions that felt almost dehumanizing, that if I’m going to find success in that space, then I need to meet this list of criteria, some of which may be compromising to what I either desire or who I am as a person.”

Meet Olivia Willoughby

• Co-Host
• Currently in her 5th year of teaching
• Teaches 8th-grade art
• I create my classroom to make space as often as possible to say, hey, we’re creating and we’re doing what we need to do, but what’s more important is who you are. 

“It’s about the people in the room learning, myself, and the other adults in the building, every single human. They have a purpose and a place. I think that’s exactly what we want to discuss on here.” 

Burnt Out Educator

• The education system is massively influential to the makeup of the US
• The Burnt Out Educator is an interview-based podcast where we talk about this system from a grassroots perspective.
• At BOE, we place immense value in hearing people’s stories.
• Because it is only through these diverse stories, we can hope to see the larger system clearly.
• Importantly, we want to hear stories all along the spectrum.
• From burnt out to thriving, we want to hear the experiences of educators and students.
• Understand, there is no interest in convincing educators to leave education.
• Put simply we are inviting humans to see themselves as humans. 

Burnt Out ———————————————————————- Thriving

Questions for the listener

• Can you allow your humanness to come through your role as an educator?
• Does it feel confronting to you when a student needs you to be more than just their teacher?
• Are you willing to put techniques and knowledge about a specific subject matter aside to talk about what’s happening in their lives outside of the room?
• Is the relationship between teacher and student a means to an end? Is it something that needs to be leveraged to achieve a goal? 

Subjectivity & Objectivity

When you’re seeing me, you’re meeting every moment I’ve ever been in.

• Objectivity: the role of educator
  • The robot
  • “You’re the art teacher, they’re all a bit out there.” 
• Subjectivity: the human that plays the role
  • “No, I do this because I’m Olivia.”
  • When you’re seeing me, you’re meeting every moment I’ve ever been in
• Intersubjective space: the space between two subjects
  • How it felt for Olivia to see the student showing up needing more than her objectivity 
  • The sum is greater than the parts

There’s tension between objectivity and subjectivity, an interpersonal conflict between the profession and what it expects.

Maybe we’re all just humans. 

• Seeing the humanity in yourself and others
• When you start to pay attention to the ways we understand humans emerge throughout their lifetime, you realize you are different after every experience you have. 
• We notice the big ones, the influential, the traumatic moments.
• But you’re also different from one room to another.
• For example, Olivia’s contemplation of what was going on with a student who threw a pencil across the room and screamed a cuss word.
• Instead of following some strict protocol, she saw the student as the full human with life before and after her class.

Our Invitation to Interviewees.

• BOE is inviting educators into this space with the hope of seeing them through these questions:
• Why did you choose education? Why do you enjoy working with kids?
  • Did you meet that objective?
  • What cost are you willing to endure to sacrifice your subjectivity to meet that objective?
• Is education a career? A job? A joy? Can it be all of them?
  • How does that change over time?
  • What’s the story behind that answer?
• How do you navigate the persistent conflict between impossible expectations and caring for your students? Objectivity and subjectivity?
• What’s it like to be a member of a system that’s perpetually labeled as broken? Who or what is the problem? Who or what is the solution?

 

We’re not here to tell people how to be. We are not here to tell them what to be, or how to live. We’re here to see human beings that happen to participate in the same community (education) and give them validation of “please, share, because we would love to hear.”

Goals of the Burnt Out Educator

• Provide a space for educators to tell their stories
• Provide an opportunity for the listener to come, connect, and feel what’s in this room. 
• Here’s the big one: donations made from listeners like you will provide therapy from highly trained therapists to children.
• Not band-aid therapy capped at 10 sessions (or any arbitrary number).
• Instead, therapy that facilitates deep change and an invitation to feeling safe in connection with another.

Interested in supporting a child? 

• https://www.patreon.com/BurntOutEducator

Beyond Healing Center

• Visit our website for all things BHC
• Contact us about retreats and therapy 
• Contact us about training and consultation

Beyond Healing Media

• First, listen to our past episodes of BOE here 
• Then, check out more Beyond Healing podcasts
  • Evidence-Based Therapist – where we read so you don’t have to!
  • Notice That – An EMDR podcast
  • Beyond Trauma – geared towards clients

 

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