Back to School

Avoiding A Sisyphean Cycle of Teaching

This piece was first published on the South Carolina Education Association’s (SCEA) Center for Educator Wellness and Learning (CEWL) site:

It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

-Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

Few professions are as strongly seasonal and cyclical as education. For those whose first profession is teaching, that cycle may have taken up the majority of your life: K-12, then college, then back into school again as as a teacher. Semester One, Winter Break, Semester Two, Spring Break, Summer Break, Rep…