Around the eight-year mark of my own teaching career, a colleague told me about the “eight-year burnout cycle” for teachers.
Something about the seven-to-nine-year mark, she said, made teachers start to wonder if they could do the job for much longer.
The truth is, I don’t know if there is actual research behind this; the whole concept is more of something I heard through the teacher grapevine.
But it was true for me.
Somewhere in that seven-to-nine-year range, I really started to hit a wall with teaching.
The way I remember my teaching career: my first year, obviously, was very difficult.
The second year, you’re kind of overconfident — you’re so glad not to be a first-year teacher, but then you have a few moments that really show you you still have a lot to learn.
And then, for me, my third year was magical.
I don’t think that timeline is exact for everyone, but I bet there’s something pretty universal about the overall arc.
There does seem to be a part of teachers’ careers that can be described as third-year energy.
You’re still new enough to be excited about it, but there’s this added level of excitement that comes from having a sample size of two different years’ worth of students to test out your techniques and work out the rough edges.
Everything is still pretty new, but it’s not brand new.
And, all of the sparks of ideas you had when you were too early in your career to implement them? Suddenly, you can make those things happen from the first day.
Now, contrast third-year energy with eighth-year energy
By your eighth year, you’re five years out from being that third-year teacher who finally felt like she was getting a grip on everything.
You have a grip on everything in your eighth year. And hopefully you’ve found ways to get at least some aspects of your classroom on autopilot.
The risk, in the seven-to-nine-year range, is that you yourself can go on autopilot.
Here’s one of the signs I remember from my own eighth-year burnout period.
Years three through seven or so, every quarter I would switch which desks students were sitting at. Part of these decisions were based on behavior, but I’d also try to give people new partners and just freshen things up a little.
My eighth year, I switched desks once, if that. I think I just left students in the same seats all year.
And the thing is: nothing terrible happened.
My students didn’t even realize that in previous years I had switched the seating chart every quarter, so they really didn’t know they were missing anything. But they were missing something, and so was I.
Because every time I had taken the time to redo those seating charts, I had given myself a chance to rethink little aspects of how I wanted to run my classroom.
I think that shows one of the defining factors of your eighth year of teaching that can lead to a sense of burnout.
You have this work you’ve put in in previous years that allows you to coast and make things a little easier for yourself. (Which you absolutely should do Every year should not feel like your first year of teaching!)
But at the same time, you have to be careful that the third-year-teacher spark doesn’t go out.
You still have to be discovering new things.
You still have to let in a little air.
There’s also a good chance that your personal life has changed by your eighth year as a teacher.
Assuming a teacher starts their career right out of college at around age 22, the eight-year mark is when that teacher turns 30.
By 30, most of us tend to know ourselves a little better than we did in our early twenties.
We’re also starting to have some idea of what shape our adult life is taking.
At this point, it’s only natural to consider how your teaching life and personal life affect one another. And if you don’t like how those two things fit together, that can feel a lot like burnout.
I’m not going to give you a list of the symptoms of burnout. Here’s why.
You could easily find an article about the symptoms of burnout.
Or just ask AI to summarize the signs of burnout. Maybe you already have.
Either way, you probably got a usable working definition.
But I want to be careful about listing the symptoms of burnout here, because, as you may have experienced when looking up the symptoms of any disease on the internet, you end up feeling sure that you have whatever it is you’re reading about.
For example, just try thinking about the symptoms of head lice right now. Are you scratching your head yet?
If you read the symptoms of burnout right now, you’ll feel like you have them. These symptoms also overlap with the symptoms of a really tiring Wednesday.
What I do want to offer is some useful ways to think about burnout, and at least an invitation to consider that it might not be permanent.
The eight-year burnout cycle is a good example of this.
Certainly, you could be burned out after eight years. Teaching is not for everyone, and even for the people it’s for, it’s not always forever. If you’re around year eight in your career and you’re feeling like you might be burned out, there are a couple of things worth considering:
First: Have your teaching life and personal life begun to affect each other in a way that doesn’t feel good to you?
And if so, is there anything you can do about that?
Second: Are there areas of your teaching where you’ve started to coast on your past efforts in a way that takes away some of that spark of discovery?
And if so, how can you get some of that back?
One note of encouragement
The teacher who first told me about the eight-year burnout cycle also mentioned that in year nine, that feeling sometimes just goes away by itself. She said a lot of teachers simply get over the hump and find themselves more ready to embrace teaching for the long term.
And that’s how it happened with me.
There was a year I felt burned out, and then the next year I just felt a lot less burned out, for reasons I can’t quite explain.
So here’s to hoping that some of that stuck feeling just resolve on its own.
If you’d like a more guided approach to making teaching and life more manageable, you may also want to check out The Maintain and Stay Sane Program.