Fit your own oxygen mask first

Being a perfectionist is far from perfect, as Sue Cowley discovered. Sometimes good is good enough...

When I first became a teacher, I threw every ounce of energy I had into my job. My lesson plans were detailed and creative and differentiated to within an inch of their lives. I would happily spend hour after hour marking in the evenings and at weekends. I would correct every single spelling and punctuation error that my students made. I would write fulsome comments and suggestions in the children’s books about how they could improve their work. (Indeed, my comments were sometimes longer than what the students had written themselves.)

I spent every weekend hunting down exciting resources, happily paying for them with my own hard earned cash. I would think nothing of designing a fully customised board game to teach a topic. I spent hours designing beautiful card sorts and my laminator worked overtime. I ran extra curricular clubs, joined working parties, and was a major player in school drama productions. If a form arrived in my pigeonhole, requiring my input, I would deliberate over what to write, before completing the form in essay length detail. If I felt sick – pah! – no excuse not to go into school. Nothing short of a notifiable infectious disease could stop me in my tracks. I was young, full of energy, and (perhaps crucially) not yet a parent.

You know the safety demonstration that they give you on an aeroplane before you take off? The stewardess holds up the oxygen mask, as though it is dangling from the ceiling. She tugs on it sharply to show you how to start the oxygen flow. And then she looks at you sternly and warns you in no uncertain terms: “Adults, fit your own oxygen masks first, before helping your children fit theirs.”

A few years into teaching, you realise that a high level of perfectionism is not sustainable. Something has to give, and that ‘something’ is typically your health, or your personal life, or both. As a perfectionist you drag yourself into school when you are feeling unwell, but then you end up spending every holiday recovering from a bug that you haven’t been able to shift. As a perfectionist you spend hours each night marking books, but eventually you ask yourself: ‘what are my children actually gaining from this?’

The light bulb moment came for me when I moved overseas to teach in an international school. Suddenly I was teaching alongside people for whom quality of life was a central philosophy. After a hard day’s teaching, we would retire to the beach, or to a café, for a rest and a chat. We worked hard, but we didn’t forget to play hard as well. And when the sun shines most of the time it’s much easier to shrug off the yoke of perfectionism.

I read a quote once in the TES: ‘Good enough is good enough.’ It is a line that has stuck with me ever since, and which I pass on to other teachers whenever I can. In the teaching profession there will always be something you could be doing, but whether you should be doing it is another matter entirely.

The penny well and truly dropped for me when I had children of my own. As a teacher, you get used to putting other people’s children first. But this is hard to justify when you suddenly realise that you are putting other people’s children ahead of your own. For some, achieving the right work/life balance might mean down sizing – perhaps working part time rather than full time, or deciding not to take a promotion because it will bring added stress. For others, the need for a better balance might trigger a move to a different kind of school, a new area of the country, or even to another part of the world.

There’s a term for the attitude we need to take: ‘selfish altruism’. In teaching, you must be altruistic enough to do the best for yourself, because if you don’t, then you will not be in a position to do the best for your children. You have to learn to say ‘that’s good enough’ and mean it. Get your priorities right, or you will be no use to anyone. Teachers: you must fix your own oxygen masks first, before you can hope to help your children put on theirs.