kzbteach

When I was a very green educator, I would find myself swamped in papers that needed grading. I would trap myself in this swamp until late at night (let’s say like 8?), put pen to paper and correct, correct, correct. There was no one keeping me there, no dragon or evil overlord, it was me and my lack of balance. It’s giving Shrek, right? Though, this isn’t an adventure love story; it’s about how I figured out ways to loosen myself from a job that was becoming a little too all-consuming (insert dragon reference here).

I have a friend, a fellow teacher, that upon getting home from school would live by candlelight for the rest of the night. Teaching is constant interaction and constant decision-making — with colleagues, students, lesson plans, behavior, outcomes, all of it. When getting home, I too would lie down on the floor in the dark and close my eyes and try my best to detach. No candle. That felt too romantic. I needed my space to be a cave (gray, dark, damp, with some dripping stalactites echoing somewhere in the depths). Something a beast might return to after a day of hunting and gathering. Except I was a teacher. And I was burning every brain-bound synapse each day that home was a place to fizzle out, melt into the cold, hard floor, and recharge.

The cave was only a single step towards sanity. Eh, maybe not sanity. Can’t return to something that I never had. 

The first year I started teaching, I added my school email to my mailbox on my phone. I kept it on my phone for 8 years without truly knowing what impact it had. Everywhere I went, school was attached to my hip. I needed to stop calling it “school.” I had already finished school — degrees earned, Masters included. What I really meant was work, and somewhere along the way the two had become interchangeable. Unbeknownst to me, the email was providing me unsolicited stress (as if someone would solicit it?). When I would look through my mailbox to find the latest coupons from Old Navy or how many Extra Care Bucks I had at CVS, I would be tempted to open up an email ending with an acronym of my place of work dot org. It would eat away at my weekends, flat tire my vacations, and sometimes blot out the personality of a personal day. Don’t even get me started with sick days (where it is honestly easier to go in with a smidge of dysentery than to create a sub plan… but that’ll be another post).  

My wife, wise as ever, told me that she deleted hers a year ago. She nudged me to do it as well. I was apprehensive at first. What if I should miss a snow day and drive an hour swerving under sheets of sleet, cursing a superintendent for their ignorant decision? What if I got fired or missed a notification that the computer charger that I left plugged in set the posters and textbooks ablaze? Worst of all, what if a parent emailed me? With all that swirling around in my anxious brain, my wife grabbed my phone, went to settings and erased the mailbox. I’m here to say that none of my fears came to fruition. We have a life beyond school. They are two separate things and they can survive in their own little universes. It made my phone a little lighter, I have to admit. And after that I could find Super Cash without fear. My anxiety of being constantly connected had disappeared and I felt my free time become a little more free.  My wife was right. There. I said it. She was right as our better halves tend to be. 

I needed something that belonged entirely to me — not grading, not planning, not answering emails.

With my phone a little lighter and my cave having made me a bit more regulated, I found another pastime that put a further-wanted rift between home and work life. Alex Guarneschelli, if you’re reading this, I want to thank you. Sunday scaries haunted me a little less because I had a hot, home-cooked, chef-quality main course to feast on and, more importantly, prepare. I found myself tapping into something I loved again. The shopping for ingredients, the prep, the cooking, and the enjoying (not the dishes, because I loathe washing plates and cups, even more so putting them in the dishwasher…too much bending for my already chiropractor-aligned spine). I found a sort of happy place in the kitchen. I could put on music, clean, cut, and chop. I could have one-sided arguments that I would always win, sautee, fry, and sear. It was a vacation that didn’t require a flight. I would open up the cookbook and maybe go to France or Italy. And after a couple of hours, I would sit at my table, plate stylized to the nines, and enjoy a good (no, great) meal with my wife before we would sink into the couch and chain ourselves to our laptops to figure out what Students Will Be Able To do on Monday. Weekends are not for the weak, especially Sundays, where the past week’s promises and put-offs insidiously creep back in. I digress. A meal like this, though, made Sunday a little less about school.

A cave is a good thing. The cell service sucks, but that’s alright. At least there on the floor, you can eat in peace with someone that you enjoy spending time with. I found peace in a cave, far from that swamp of papers. It transformed into a place of blissful, healthy ignorance. I do and did my job well. I think, after making some of these changes, I did my job even better because I felt a little more human. I still got stressed. I still sometimes would log-in to that merciless mailbox or break my Sunday supper tradition with a box of low mein and a final project to create. All that I would sometimes still do. “Sometimes” being the key word. There was balance sometimes, not all the time. And it was a good thing. 

– Zach, June 2026