Nothing in the classroom is worth added stress in your life. Nothing. I know so many band directors (and other teachers as well, but mostly band directors) who get so incredibly worked up over their jobs that they lose their health, marriage, youthful physique, energy, or alienate their own children. Why? Because of their own selfish [...]

Hello everybody! Since Joel made this forum available, I thought I’d jump on board while the iron is hot (not to mix metaphors or anything).  Also, since Joel’s vacation and mine (leaving at the butt-crack of dawn tomorrow morning for Comic-Con in San Diego) pretty nearly coincide, I figured I should do it sooner than later! For [...]

Lisa writes: I googled “bitter about teaching” and came up with your blog.  I was recently let go from a school I busted my a$$ in for a whole year (my first year) - constant criticism, cattiness, and pointing out and embellishing the negative things I had done while minimizing the positive (all the while they [...]

When all else fails… Subscribe to this blog by clicking on the orange button on the left.Click the StumbleUpon link below to share this blog with the world!© SoYouWantToTeach.com - visit So You Want To Teach? for more great content.

In this article, I’ll revisit 10 of my 25 Tips For Less Stress that I have found to be most helpful for me over the last two weeks or exponentially heightened stress. Christmas is coming, and with is seems to be incredible stress for a lot of people. Perhaps it’s because I am not married and have no children, but Christmastime has ...

This may well be the first time I have written about my teaching life without really setting out a solution or providing much helpful information. Let me know what you think. Last Friday, the other band director I work with had a mile stroke. He is recovering and is at home resting now. The doctors told him to not return to work for six weeks. As ...

I have decided to compile all of the articles from my series 25 Tips For Less Stress into one handy ebook. The Instant De-Stress Handbook is completely free to download. To get your copy, simply subscribe to my RSS feed. A link to download the ebook should appear at the bottom of the feed every [...]

This past Tuesday, I took a day off of school. This is not normal for me, and I even had to fight my urge to go up to school and make sure things were running smoothly. I even drove up to the school and chose not to get out of the car. Why? Because I had [...]

We come now to the final chapter of our 25 Tips For Less Stress. This is perhaps my favorite one of all. Without this decision, you cannot have a stress-free life. The key is to choose to have fun at work. No matter what industry you work in, if you love your job, you will be [...]

I wrote a couple of days ago about a plan to reduce the amount of papers that you take home. Preferably, that number will approach zero as your systems get refined. That is NOT the focus of this entry. The goal here is to truly liberate you from your job. The story goes: A senior monk and [...]