There is a particular type of throbbing migraine that is unique to individuals who teach English to non-native speakers. If you’ve had the experience of attempting to extract meaning from a garbled line of English where the adjectives are out of order, the sentence has six different verb tenses, and every single word is misspelled, you’ll know what I mean. If you have never been an English teacher in a foreign country, the headache can be compared to having a rubber bladder filled with scalding hot water inserted just behind the bridge of your nose, which slowly expands over a 8 hour period to eventually fill a space about ten times larger than the volume of your skull. It’s painful to say the least.
Suggesting that you could fight this sensation with healthy snacks is the type of statement that might garner some skepticism. However, there were a lot of behaviors that I eventually adopted during my time as a teacher that I initially regarded as utterly incapable of effecting any positive result.
One example came from grading papers. Initially I would check every section, and then add up the sections in my head to get the total score. This was very basic arithmetic, but one of my fellow teachers looked at me like I was crazy. “You should get a calculator,” he said. “Naw, that’s just lazy,” I replied. However, a few weeks later, I happened to have a calculator while grading, and, upon completing the tests, I was amazed at how fresh I felt. You wouldn’t think that something like doing basic addition in your head could tax you physically, but do the experiment for yourself. It’s not something you might be aware of from just a small sampling, but over the course of a 8 hour day, filled with other tasks, any effort you can eliminate creates a cumulative effect.
Teaching is a taxing job, and you should take advantage of every opportunity to keep yourself fresh and patient. Exhaustion brings hostility, and hostility will not assist your purpose in conveying a complex lesson. In fact, the natural exhaustion that you feel at the end of the day can reduce your effectiveness to the point of being counter productive.
Throughout my years as a marathon runner and a cross-country skier, I’ve dabbled in sports nutrition. I know the rules, but quite often I’m too lazy to actually live by them. When you’re exercising at an extreme effort, your body needs sugar. Your metabolism seeks high octane fuel that it can turn into energy immediately. This is one of the great things about exercise, because it allows people who have a “sweet tooth” to still get their sugar fix in a way that’s healthy. If you eat a candy bar 15 minutes into a difficult session, the furnace is stoked, and the sugar is burned up without any lasting effect. It gives you a boost that will take you to the next feed.
However, what happens is that people find a nutritional philosophy that works during exercise, and they assume the same thing will work in their office environment. It comes from the thinking, “hey, if 8 is good then 10 is better,” but that’s not always the case.
Teaching is taxing, but it’s not the same effort of physical exertion. Therefore, if you combat hunger pangs with a candy bar, you’ll get a brief surge of satisfaction, followed by a headache exacerbating crash that will turn you into a beast. Believe me, I fought this kicking and screaming, and what makes things even more difficult is the healthy snack doesn’t give you the satisfying spike that you get immediately after eating the candy bar. However, if you learn to adjust your expectations to how you will feel in fifteen minutes, versus how you will feel immediately, you can retrain your mind to start reaching for the appropriate fuel.
Don’t ever say, “I’m going to deny myself that candy bar,” because that’s not a good long term philosophy for changing your own behavior. Sooner or later you’re going to rebel and start thinking, “but I deserve that candy bar.” Instead, tell yourself, “I’ll feel better if I eat that healthy snack, so this is kind of a reward.” You’ll be skeptical at first, but over time your body will come to accept that this is true. Healthy snacks for work give you a better chance of getting to the end of the day fresh and effective at doing your job.
Throughout most of my career as a teacher in Peru, healthy snacks and healthy meals were readily available, but they’re the type of thing you can walk by without even seeing. It’s easy to get focused on the instant gratification of what you’ve kind of been trained to eat. But if you’ve grown weary of pinching the bridge of your nose at the end of the day because the throbbing behind your sinus cavity is interrupting your ability to think, then give healthy snacks a try. You’ll be pleasantly surprised when you find it does actually seem to work. The pain of the headache is way worse than the brief spike of the sugar rush.
