Three Gifts Every Burned-Out Teacher Needs Right Now: Not a Wishlist. A Survival Kit

Episode Summary:

December isn’t just tinsel and teacher mugs. It’s also the season when most educators crash - emotionally, physically, and financially. In this powerful kickoff to her “12 Gifts of Christmas” series, this episode delivers the first three transformative gifts every burned-out teacher needs:

🎁 Gift #1: Permission to Rest

Why your body’s exhaustion isn’t laziness. It’s the result of systemic design. Vanessa hands you a literal and metaphorical permission slip to stop apologizing for rest.

🎁 Gift #2: A Guided Gratitude Reflection

Gratitude isn’t toxic positivity. It’s a secret weapon in career transition. Learn how to reframe your teaching experience as proof of your strength, skill, and value as a headstart on resumes and an updated LinkedIn Page.

🎁 Gift #3: The Courage to Dream Again

Dreaming is an act of resistance. Vanessa offers a compassionate path back to your future, with baby steps, brave moments, and a gentle reminder that your courage doesn’t need to roar.

Along the way, Vanessa also tackles:

• The real math behind “paid vacations” (spoiler: you’re not)
• How loan reclassifications are gatekeeping leadership roles
• The student loan trap that targets teachers, nurses, and social workers
• Why burnout is not your fault—and what to do with the wisdom it left behind

💌 GRAB YOUR FREE DECEMBER GIFTS:

These three resources are yours to download — no strings attached.

🎁 Gift #1: Permission to Rest
🎁 Gift #2: Gratitude Reflection Guide
🎁 Gift #3: Courage to Dream Worksheet

Need help getting them? Email Vanessa directly at Vanessa@TeachersinTransition.com and she’ll send them your way.

👋 CONNECT WITH VANESSA

You are not alone—and you were never the problem. Stay connected for weekly wisdom and resources:

• 💌 Email: Vanessa@teachersintransition.com
• 📱 Call or Text: 512-640-9099
• 📅 Book a Free Discovery Call: teachersintransition.com/calendar
• 🔗 Bluesky: @beyondteaching.bsky.social
• 📸 Instagram & Threads: @teachers.in.transition
• 👍 Facebook: Teachers in Transition
• 🐦 X (Twitter): @EduExitStrategy

🎧 Listen & Subscribe!

Available on Apple, Spotify, Buzzsprout & everywhere you get your podcasts.
 
 

The transcript to this podcast is found on the episode’s homepage at Buzzsprout

Transcript

Hi!  And Welcome back to another episode of Teachers in Transition with me, Vanessa Jackson! If you're new here, welcome to the community.
 If you’ve been listening for a while, you already know the deal:
 we talk honestly around here — but we don’t add to your stress pile.

Today on the pod, we are welcoming December, and instead of bombarding you with fake cyber sales, I am using this month and the podcast to pass out the 12 Gifts of Christmas from me to you.  The first three are in this episode.  If you want to retrieve them, you can find the links in the show notes.   The first three gifts relate to Rest, Gratitude, and Courage 

Each one of these matters on its own.
 But taken together?
 They’re a reset button — especially when the news cycle, your paycheck, and the entire educational ecosystem feel like they’re held together with duct tape and vibes.

So today we’re going to name what’s real  -  gently  -  and then reclaim what’s actually ours.

It’s the time of year when I like to go on my own social media and remind people that it’s not a Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Winter Vacation.  It’s an unpaid furlough.  And it’s a little alarming at how often I have to argue with people about that – including teachers. Let’s start with something I think every one should hear out loud:

Teachers are not paid for holidays.
Teachers  are not paid for winter break.
And no, Teachers are definitely not paid for summer.

But every December, someone pipes up and says,
 “So what does it feel like to get paid for vacation?”

And every teacher has that internal moment: the twitch, the hollow laugh, the spiritual sigh,  The urge to throw something heavy  at them. 

So let’s clear it up once and for all.

Teachers are only paid for the days they are under contract.
Usually it could be 180, 187, 190 days — whatever the district math decided.

Your salary = daily rate × contracted number of days.

That’s it.
And in some places, those daily rates look pretty good.  There was a time in my teaching career where I felt very adequately compensated for the work I did.  In my last year of teaching, I calculated that it would take $25,000 more per year to adequately compensate me for the time and the labor involved. 

But they have that daily rate times contracted days and THEN — for HR’s convenience, not yours — they divide it into 10 or 12  months so that it’s easier. 
 
AND because it’s not enough of a slap in the face to set it up this way given today’s technological abilities, most teachers have an additional two weeks without a paycheck between December- January.  To keep things easy on HR who also wants to be home on break, you’ll see your paycheck drop on the last school day before break.  Only to not see another paycheck again until the end of January.  (sometimes mid-January if your district is advanced enough to pay twice a month.  Most districts that I have been associated with pay monthly).

I do have  Five Top-tier Responses for the next time someone asks you what it feels like to get paid for time off:

1. “Oh, I’m not paid for vacations — my annual pay is just divided into 12 months to make HR’s life easier.”

2. “Teachers are only paid for the days we’re under contract. Holidays are unpaid furlough days with festive branding.”

3. “My paycheck doesn’t mean they paid me for time off — just that they stretched my pay like taffy across the calendar.”

4. “I’m paid for the days I work. The 12-month schedule is just a spreadsheet preference.”

5. “If teachers were actually paid for holidays, we wouldn’t have a 5–6 week gap between checks every December and January.”

Got more?  You have to email me yours at Vanessa@teachersintransition.com!
If you feel something in your body just unclenched, that’s because this confusion is engineered.
The system benefits from teachers thinking they already get enough.

You don’t.
 You never have.
 And that brings us to my first gift to you.

⭐ GIFT #1: The Permission to Rest

Once you understand the truth about your pay — once you realize you have been effectively furloughed every holiday of your career — the levels of exhaustion you carry make perfect sense.

No one was never meant to operate like this.

So today I hand you Gift #1:
 Your Permission Slip to Rest.

Rest without guilt.
 Rest without apology.
 Rest without earning it.

Rest is not laziness — it is repair.
 Rest is how you return to yourself.

Its like the story of the explorers who were going through this new area with indigenous guides.  And the explorers were pushing hard.  They had places to go and THINGS to see.  And at one point the guides jus sat down and refused to move for3ward one inch more.  And when they were pressed on it, the answers the explorers finally got was that they needed time for their souls to catch up with them.
 
 I love that. That is SO true.  Rest is how your soul finds you.  

And in the spirit of fun, there is a permission slip you can print out and hand to people that question when you rest. 
 
 Reminds me of all the times I would give my band students WILD homework assignments in the very beginning – things like laying on the floor and breathe (in order to allow the diaphragm to engage properly).  I’d tell them to time it so a parent would wander over and ask what they heck they were doing.  They students could get a good giggle and say “Homework.  Ask my teacher!!!”  
 
 I was really training them to spend time on band every day and engage parents.
 
 But similarly – here’s a permission slip to rest.  In December that’s vital to avoid the crash-outs that come when a teacher has been carrying the emotional load for everything for everyone.  It might even prevent you from getting sick as soon as your break starts.

All right.
 Deep breath.
 We’re going to move into something even more frustrating making the rounds. 
 
 

⭐ SEGMENT 2: The De-Professionalization Nonsense + The Loan Trap (Expanded)

Before I say one more word, I want to make something absolutely clear:

Doing an analysis of the consequences of a policy is not the same thing as endorsing the policy.
I am not in alignment with this decision as a first move. 
I am not pretending any of this makes sense.

I am just providing some clarity.

Recently, the Department of Education released a list of graduate degrees they’ve reclassified as “non-professional.”

They have stated that they are doing this to cap loan amounts in an effort to require colleges to bring costs down.  Yeah, I’m coming back around to that shortly.  This is such a bonkers move that it’s hard to prioritize the things I want to address first.  But let’s start with this: 

Guess who made the list?

• Teaching
• Nursing
• Social Work
• Business
• Even Engineering

And here’s the part that would be funny if it weren’t tragic:

**In teaching and nursing, these degrees aren’t really optional.

They are literally the only gateway into administration and in some states that masters degree is required if you want to teach at all!

If you want to become:

• an instructional coach
• a reading specialist
• a school counselor
• an assistant principal
• a principal
• a diagnostician
• a curriculum coordinator
• a director of special education
• a superintendent
• Any district level director/coordinator/supervisor
   
   

…you must have a graduate degree the government just demoted to “non-professional.”

Nursing? Same deal.
 You can’t lead in a hospital without an advanced degree.

So what happens when you devalue the degrees required to move into leadership?

You choke the leadership pipeline.
 You shrink mobility.
 You widen inequity.
 You limit who can advance — and who can’t.

That’s why people are upset.  You didn’t hear much out of the business and engineering community on this.  It doesn’t affect their upward mobility  
 
 Let’s talk about who gets hurt in these service-based professions  (who are all coincidentally or not all mandated reporters):

• Working-class professionals who rely on federal loans
• Women, who dominate teaching and nursing
• People of color, who already face structural obstacles
• First-generation students, who depend on accessible pathways
• Experienced teachers who want to lead schools, not just survive them

And yes — whether intentional or not — this is a structural shift that will determine who gets to run schools and hospitals for the next 20 years.

If only wealthy people can afford the degrees required to move up, then leadership becomes a gated community.

And that is not okay.

I want to bring this down from the policy level into the personal level — because the student loan system isn’t an abstract concept for most teachers.  And the student loan industry is one I’ve been railing against for a decade because of how poorly it’s structured. 
 
 Coincidentally, one of my rants popped up in my memories Facebook feed so I’ll share it here: This was Vanessa in 2021.

I’m going to take this moment and rail against how student loans are handled again. 

Don’t @me about “you have to pay back what you borrowed” because that’s not the point. I’ve not missed one payment – even during the pandemic shutdown of collections. 

My student loan was for a Master’s Degree to the tune of $20,800. The university wanted all the money upfront - hence the loan. With an interest rate of 5.41% and estimated interest, the total repayment would be about $28,500 in the end. I agreed because the pay bump in Alaska from Bachelor’s to Master's was worth it, and I was hoping to break into admin. (whole ‘nother story on how bureaucracy in the form of differing state standards killed that little idea). 

Loans went “live” at the end of 2015. My credit rating took an immediate hit. Good thing I wasn’t just starting out in life trying to buy a house, a car, rent an apartment, or anything else. You know, like a lot of college kids are. 

I started off making extra payments, but the extra payment didn’t just go to principal – it actually went more to interest. I stopped that because it wasn’t worth it. I just made my payment every month. I was never given the option to maybe make the payment officially bigger to pay it off early – but I am constantly bombarded with options to make it smaller which makes it take longer. 

Loans were frozen in March 2020, so the interest [had] not been accruing since that time. I took advantage of the moment to set up some autopayments and send money every month anyway. I just took my regular payment and rounded up to the nearest tens place. By the time student loans [would be] live again, I will have paid almost $6300 off of the loan and will have just over $5k left to go. 

I remain horrified at how student loans are handled. I know there’s a lot of discussion about forgiving any of it. I question whether the way payments were structured would have really paid that loan off in ten years as it suggested. I wonder how much of our government economy runs off the money the government makes off those loans – especially since you can’t even discharge the debt in bankruptcy. 

My oldest is a graduate student now. She has to fill out the FAFSA even though she doesn’t need loan assistance. She doesn’t take the loans. Imagine her surprise when she learned by accident that instead of just not accepting the loans, she had to actively go in and DECLINE them. All of this for money she never asked for in the first place. I don't know whether to  be just sad, or be sad & horrified. 

I remain by my assertion that they are predatory loans. This is where I developed my anti-FAFSA stance. Loans might be necessary for some kids to be able to go to college, but very often, those same kids are being placed in indentured servitude to the government for ten years on these loans that IMMEDIATELY make it more difficult to be independent six months from graduation. How is that the right thing to do to them? I just really struggle with it. 

My second masters program is a pay-as-you-go plan, which was a LARGE part of the reason I decided to send my money there. I'd like to see that incentivized more in a way that benefits students and colleges.

And since that ran across my feed, I did feel the need to update that.  Here is the update: 

I didn’t finish the masters referenced in that post. That might be why some of those schools want all their money up front.  I gave up on it because a little market research indicated I wouldn’t be able to get work in that field.

I do want to point out that I did get a full second master’s degree. An Executive MBA. My degree was from an accredited school that will not take U.S. government money. I got a scholarship and a discount for paying the rest of it up front. My out the door cost was $6500. I graduated this past August.

I remain convinced that government is at the root of making school too expensive through administrative costs, but I’ll also acknowledge it’s WAY too knotted up to fix with one single fix. 

De-professionalizing so many degrees only limits what people can borrow. It doesn’t reduce the cost of using government money. Maybe a better first step is to make the interest on those loans a LOT lower and give 4-5 years of Zero interest while they’re in school.

That is the system teachers live in.  This is the only system that exists if we want to move up. 

A system where:

• You pay tens of thousands for a degree that sets you up to owe the government for a minimum of ten years.  
• Your paycheck gets stretched thin enough to see daylight through it and you just pray that nothing big breaks in January. 
• HR structures hide unpaid furlough days as “breaks” and “vacation”
• And the only way to advance is through degrees the federal government just downgraded

So let me say this clearly:

None of this is your fault.
 None of this is about your worth.
 None of this reflects your professionalism.

And now that we’ve told the truths about the system, it is time to note some truths about you.

⭐ 

You’ve been through a lot.  That comes with wisdom based on your experiences and problem-solving skills. 

It’s gratitude. The gratitude that says:

“What teaching gave me is mine.
 No system can take it.
 And these skills are coming with me.”
Let me say that last part again:  “And these vast and varied skills are coming with me.”

Because here’s the secret:

Gratitude is a career transition tool.

When you list:

• What abilities you developed
• What strengths you built
• What boundaries you reclaimed
• What clarity you earned
• What hard things you survived

…you’re actually pre-mapping:

• Your résumé bullet points
• Your LinkedIn About section
• Your interview stories
• Your transferable skills
• Your next chapter

 Gratitude is not about pretending your burnout didn’t happen.
 It’s about recognizing what it revealed and what you earned every step of the way.

And once you see exactly what valuable luggage you carry, (it’s not just baggage) something shifts.
 Something opens.
 
 Gift #2 for you is a guided reflection to help you walk through that Gift of Gratitude and start to list these things.   It is available in the show notes. 

Which brings us to our last gift and that is COURAGE.

⭐ GIFT #3: The Courage to Dream

Dreaming feels dangerous when you’re tired.
 Dreaming feels irresponsible when your paycheck is confusing.
 Dreaming feels impossible when the system keeps moving the goalposts.

But dreaming is how you reclaim your life and plan a future.

Not the big, flashy, visionary dreams — not yet. I’m talking about the small, honest, brave dreams:

• The truth you’ve been avoiding
• The tiny 10-minute step you could take this week
• The part of you that’s been whispering: “There has to be more”
• The evidence that you can do hard things because you already have

Your courage doesn’t need to roar.  It can whisper:
 “I choose to begin.”

And that is enough.

The third gift walks you through what courage could look like and what steps you can take to be brave.   These are all absolutely free and you can find them for download in the show notes.   If you don’t want to track down the show notes, just send me a quick email at Vanessa@TeachersinTransition.com and I’ll send them straight to you!

⭐So in closing today’s gifts are simple but powerful:

• Rest, because you were never paid to be superhuman
• Gratitude, because your skills are real and portable
• Courage, because your future is not defined by a broken system that you had nothing ot do with making.

You are not the problem here.
 You never were.
 You’re the person keeping the whole thing afloat — and you deserve better.

I’m proud of you.
 I’m with you.
 You got this. 

*******

Email me at Vanessa@teachersintransition.com
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