The Testing Tax: Why Teachers Are So Tired Right Now

This week, Vanessa talks about a tax no one warns teachers about: the hidden toll of testing season. If you are extra tired right now, emotionally thin, strangely drained, or wondering why you still feel exhausted after a weekend, this episode is for you.

She also shares a practical Teacher Hack for tired humans and explains why many educators who find this show are already in the Decide stage of career transition long before they realize it.

In This Episode

 The Testing Tax

Standardized testing season often costs more than anyone admits.

Teachers are asked to hold everything together while schedules shift, technology misbehaves, students feel pressure, and everyone pretends this is normal. Vanessa explores why that kind of hyper-vigilance creates a very real toll on your body, brain, and nervous system.

Sometimes you are not lazy. You are taxed.

 Teacher Hack: Fajita Surprise

When you are bone-deep tired and cannot make one more decision, dinner needs to get simpler.

Because simplification is not failure. It is strategy.

 Career Transition: The Decide Stage

Most people assume career change starts with resumes and job boards.

Vanessa explains why many educators actually begin in the Decide stage first — the moment when you start noticing the cost of staying more clearly than you used to.

Questions like:

• Why am I this tired every year?
• Why does every break feel like recovery instead of rest?
• Why do I keep saying “one more year”?

Those are Decide-stage questions.

 A Powerful Reminder

You may be at the fork in the road called Decide.

Good news: that is not a dead end. That is where you stop settling and start choosing the bigger life.

Mentioned in This Episode

• Teachers in Transition — https://teachersintransition.com
• Podcast Home — https://teachersintransition.buzzsprout.com
• Jim Gaffigan on “same ingredients, different meal” energy: Jim Gaffigan - Mexican Food (1996)
• Support the podcast directly through the Buzzsprout support link in the episode player. (youtube.com)

 Support the Show

If this episode helped you, made you laugh, or made you feel a little less alone:

• Follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
• Leave a rating or review
• Share this episode with a fellow teacher
• Keep listening

Want to support this scrappy little indie podcast financially? You can do that for as little as $3/month through the support link in the show notes

 Work With Vanessa

If you know something needs to change but you are not sure what, Vanessa helps educators navigate that fork in the road.

Visit Teachers in Transition at https://teachersintransition.com to learn more and book a conversation.

 Share This Episode

Know a teacher who is exhausted right now and wondering why? Send them this episode. Sometimes the kindest thing we can offer another educator is language for what they’re carrying.

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

Transcript

Hi! Welcome back to Teachers in Transition!  This is the podcast for educators who are wondering what else might be possible, whether that means leaving the classroom, shifting roles, or simply reclaiming a little more of yourself in the process. More importantly, this is the podcast where teachers are valued. I am so happy you’re here today.  Today we’re going to talk about a tax many teachers know well, even if no one sends you a formal notice. We’ll talk about the hidden cost of testing season, a practical hack for tired and hungry humans, and in the career transition segment, we’ll discuss why many people who find this show are in the Decide stage long before they realize it.

We have two dogs (which occasionally make sound appearances on this podcast if I don’t catch it…).  One of the little things we do is we save the last bite of something appropriate for them to eat from dinner and they have to wait until the end to get it.  We call it “paying taxes.”  The Dog Tax.  A nice side effect is that if they are still using those you-never-feed-me-and-I’m-starving eyes, we can say “we have paid our taxes, you’re done. No more!” and they leave.  If only that worked with the government… I’m kidding… partly. 

Most people think tax season ends around April 15th. They file the forms, grumble a little bit, maybe celebrate a refund, and move on with life. Teachers know there can be another tax due right about now. I call it the Testing Tax, and unlike the IRS, this one often gets paid in patience, nervous system energy, disrupted schedules, and the last clean scraps of emotional bandwidth that you have left.

Testing season takes a toll on nearly everyone involved. Students feel the pressure, even the ones pretending they do not care. Campuses start operating in strange rhythms, where normal instruction gets bent around procedures, schedules, computer carts, silence requirements, and a general feeling that nobody should breathe too loudly. Teachers, though, often carry the heaviest part of it because they are the ones holding the room together while the machine runs.

As I mentioned a few podcasts back, every spring I spend time accompanying high school students who are preparing advanced solos for competition. A couple of weeks ago, I came home absolutely wiped out, and it took me a day or two to understand why. I mean, I had been sitting down at a piano for six-ish hours. On paper, that does not sound like the kind of thing that should flatten a person.

But if you have listened to me for any length of time, you know I am suspicious of the word just. “I was just sitting there.” “I was just playing piano.” “I was just monitoring.” Just is often a misleading word. It tends to erase the hardest parts of a job while pretending only the visible parts count.

What was really happening was incredibly high-level cognitive work. I was processing difficult music in real time, anticipating how each student wanted to phrase something, adjusting instantly when nerves changed tempo, covering mistakes smoothly, tracking page turns, and trying to think the way they were thinking so I could support where they were headed next. My body was seated. My brain was doing shuttle sprints and burpees.

That’s when it kinda clicked for me. Sitting down does not always mean resting. Looking calm does not mean low effort. Walking slowly around a classroom monitoring children but not looking at their tests is tough! Some work is exhausting precisely because it requires constant alertness, quick adjustments, emotional steadiness, and the ability to solve problems without making the room feel the problem.

Teachers, if you are extra tired right now, that may be exactly what is happening to you too. During testing season, educators are monitoring technology, timing, behavior, bathroom needs, hallway noise, student emotions, and whatever fresh nonsense decides to appear at 9:17 a.m. in the morning. You are staying calm so others can stay calm. You are absorbing friction in real time, and that kind of vigilance costs something.

And from the outside, people may not always understand why it is tiring. They may think, well, you were just proctoring. You were just reading directions. You were just walking around quietly. There is that word again. Just. Meanwhile, your nervous system has been running a full staff meeting, a fire drill, and customer service desk all at once.

Somewhere right now, someone is building a PowerPoint called The Seven Sociological Dimensions of Testing Fatigue. Meanwhile, teachers would settle for a nap, a working copier, and five meetings reduced to just an email.

That is why some of you are extra tired right now and cannot quite explain it. You may sleep, rest, or even have a decent weekend, and still feel oddly drained on Monday morning. That does not automatically mean you are lazy, broken, weak, or bad at self-care. Sometimes it means you have been paying a tax for weeks, and the bill was larger than you realized.

There is also a strange emotional whiplash this time of year. Students start sensing summer in the distance and begin acting like school is already optional. Meanwhile, teachers are trying to finish strong, maintain standards, close gaps, survive ceremonies, track grades, answer emails, and keep everyone between the lines. One group smells freedom, and the other is still towing the trailer uphill.

Now to be clear. I am not against measurement, accountability, or knowing whether students are learning. Those things matter. But kids are not beans to be counted, and somewhere along the way some systems became so devoted to measurement that they forgot the humanity of the people being measured and the people doing the measuring. In my own home state of Texas, I don’t think teachers truly trust the test to measure what it is supposed to measure.  Different studies in 2012 and 2016 did, in fact, find that tests were testing students above what they were supposed to know all in the name of rigor.  (That’s another word that has been ruined for me because it was weaponized by education pundits and policymakers and pushed down to bludgeon teachers who KNOW that kids are being asked to do developmentally inappropriate things and are just trying to keep all the plates spinning.  

I can remember back in the early days of these high-stakes tests when parent volunteers were allowed to help escort students to the restroom. Somewhere along the way, places decided that task suddenly required a certified educator. Funny how, now in the year of Beyonce’s internet, 2026 during testing season, highly trained professionals can end up functioning as hallway security, traffic control, and compliance support. If that sounds inefficient, that is because it is.

So if you are feeling unusually depleted right now, I want to offer you a different interpretation. Maybe you are not failing to cope. Maybe you are carrying April and May. Maybe your body and mind are responding normally to sustained pressure in an environment that often pretends pressure has no cost.   And because I KNOW you are depleted, I want you to be gentle with yourself. And also remember this: when we are exhausted, we often reach for things that promise relief but do not really restore us. Fast food, for example, rarely makes me feel better - and half the time it is not even faster.

Which brings me to this week’s Teacher Hack.

Our Teacher Hacks are tips and tricks that are practical things I share that are designed to save you from the three coins many teachers pay with every day: time, money, and stress. The idea is simple. If we can reduce the drain in those areas, you free up a little more physical energy, a little more mental well-being, and frankly, a little more brain space for the things you actually want to do with your life.

This week’s hack is for those evenings when you are bone-deep tired and the last thing you want to do is make another decision. You know the feeling. You get home, you’re exhausted, everyone still expects dinner, and suddenly ordering pizza or grabbing fast food starts sounding like a reasonable life plan. I understand the temptation. But for me, fast food rarely makes me feel better as mentioned above. It usually makes me feel heavy, sluggish, and less than thrilled if I still need to function like a human afterward.

So around our house, we use a little menu-planning tactic I call Fajita Surprise. Our local grocery store carries pre-seasoned chicken, which means a lot of the heavy lifting is already done. I pop it in the oven, cook it, slice it up, slice some vegetables like peppers or onions or tomatoes or whatever.  And Then everybody builds tacos on the shell of their choice. Soft shell, hard shell, flour, corn, I am not here to police  tortilla decisions.

What I like about this meal is that it is still relatively cost-effective, even in these expensive times, and it gives you leftovers. That means you are not just solving dinner for tonight. You are buying yourself a little peace for tomorrow too. Teachers, we love anything that handles tomorrow in advance.

Night one might be fajita tacos. Night two might mysteriously become nachos supreme. Night three, if the leftovers are still hanging around, could turn into quesadillas. Somehow it is all the same ingredients just in a different costume, which honestly is one of the great tricks of adulthood.

That is why I call it Fajita Surprise. Not because it is surprising, but because everyone acts surprised every time it returns in a slightly different form. “Oh wow, quesadillas tonight?” Yes. Same cast, new script.  You could even ditch the tortilla entirely, use a bunch of lettuce and a Fajita  chicken salad. 

And let me say this clearly: when you are overwhelmed, simplification is not failure. It is strategy. If dinner can be easier this week, let dinner be easier this week. You do not need to earn exhaustion points by making life harder than it already is.

I can usually stretch one round of Fajita Surprise into at least two meals, sometimes three, depending on how hungry everybody is and whether someone discovers it in the fridge at midnight. It saves money, it saves time, and most importantly, it saves you from standing in the kitchen staring into space wondering what to cook while your soul quietly exits your body.

Jim Gaffigan, the comedian,  has a great comedy routine about how so many meals are basically the same ingredients at a Mexican restaurant rearranged into different shapes. He is not wrong. I’ll drop a link in the show notes. But honestly, if the food works, people eat it, and you keep your sanity, that sounds like a win to me. It might be important to mention here that fajita surprise pops almost every week around here on the menu plan. 

And moving on to our career transition and job search segment, let’s talk about data for a moment.  But never fear – this data is for you, so there’s no aggregating or disaggregating  or any uncomfortable meetings going on. If you’ve listened for any length of time, you know I often talk about five broad stages people move through when they are changing careers or trying to build a life that fits better. Those stages are Decide, Clarify, Build, Refine, and Attract. I use them because people tend to think career change is one giant leap, when in reality it is usually a series of smaller, smarter steps.

Now here is the interesting part. Most people who find this podcast are not in Build yet. They are not ready to rewrite a resume at 9:30 tonight. They are not sitting there comparing fonts for LinkedIn banners. Most people who find this show are in Decide, even if they do not realize that is what it is called.

Decide is often quieter than people expect. It does not always look dramatic. There is no movie soundtrack. No one is flipping a desk and storming out while carrying a Ficus plant. Decide often starts with a thought you cannot un-think. It starts when you notice the cost of staying more clearly than you used to.  

It may sound like this: “Why am I this tired every year?” “Why does every break feel like recovery instead of rest?” “Why do I keep saying one more year like I am negotiating with a hostage taker?” “Why am I capable of doing this job but less convinced I am meant to keep doing it forever?” Those are Decide-stage questions.

For me, it was the moment I saw a friend’s Facebook post sharing that her divorce was final, so that now she could share that she’d been an abused spouse the entire time.  I started to form the thought where I wondered how someone could stay in a relationship like that, and then my brain interrupted that thought before it was even fully formed to hit me with the epiphany “You know, you are in an abusive relationship with your JOB.”  And there was no unseeing that for me.  It’s different for everyone.  But that was the moment I knew something had to change and started looking around for exactly what that would be.  

And let me tell you something else. Decide is not passive. Decide is not wasting time. Decide is not you being flaky or negative or dramatic. Decide is data-gathering. Decide is reality-testing. Decide is the stage where you stop gaslighting yourself and start paying attention. 

A lot of people skip this step because they are uncomfortable with uncertainty. They want immediate answers. They want someone to hand them a three-step plan and a cute printable. I understand that deeply. But if the truth is still blurry, rushing into tactics can waste a lot of energy. You do not need a polished resume for a future you have not even named yet.

So here is what I recommend if you think you might be in Decide. Open the notes app on your phone, send yourself text messages, grab a legal pad, use the back of a piece of junk mail - I am not picky. Title it:

Evidence I’m Ready for More

And then start collecting evidence instead of demanding answers.

Write down what drains you consistently. Not one weird Tuesday. Patterns. Is it behavior chaos? Micromanagement? Never-ending emotional labor? The feeling that everything urgent arrives at once? Write it down.

Write down what energizes you, even inside a hard week. Maybe you love mentoring younger teachers. Maybe you enjoy organizing systems. Maybe you light up when training adults, building materials, solving problems, or leading a project. Those clues matter because exhaustion can hide strengths from you. Write them down.

Write down skills you use every day that other industries value, even if nobody around you names them that way. Let me get you started: Conflict resolution. Project management. Communication. Prioritization. Training. Public speaking. Logistics. Relationship management. Adaptability under pressure. In some schools, that is just called Wednesday. Write it down.

Write down what you no longer want to normalize. That one is powerful. Sometimes we get so used to carrying nonsense that we stop noticing it is nonsense. Chronic stress. Disrespect. Unrealistic expectations. Being treated like your every boundary is a personal insult. Put it on paper. Seeing it in writing changes things.  A big one for me was the use of guilt to extract MORE from me when I had no more to give. 

And write down what sounds appealing when you let yourself be honest. Not practical yet. Honest. Remote work. Adult learners. Fewer interruptions. Better pay. Calm. Creativity. Working with competent people. Using the restroom without needing tactical planning. Dream a little.  That restroom thing is a big deal y’all!  When I was back on that high school campus playing for those high school students, mostly my teacher bladder came back, but since I didn’t have keys to anything, those last few moments of asking permission and getting to the adult bathroom before making an embarrassing mess were iffy. 

Now, why am I having you collect data? Because exhausted people often struggle to dream clearly. That is not a character flaw. That is just fatigue. But even tired people can notice patterns. Even tired people can gather truth. Even tired people can begin.  And it’s so important to name it in the moment because much like childbirth, the natural optimistic nature of those drawn to teaching makes teachers forget how much it hurt in the moment. 

Later, when your energy returns, those notes become incredibly valuable when you start to question whether it was really that bad. They help you Clarify what kind of work fits you. They help you Build a stronger resume because now you can see your real skills. They help you Refine your applications because you know what you are aiming at. They help you Attract opportunities because you are speaking from truth instead of panic.

And let me say one more thing that matters. If you go through an honest Decide process and realize you want to stay in education – but maybe in a healthier role, a healthier district, or in a healthier way - that still counts. Staying on purpose is very different from staying by default.

Some people think career transition work only matters if you leave. I disagree. Sometimes the real victory is regaining your agency. Sometimes the win is no longer feeling trapped. Sometimes the win is realizing you have options, and options calm the nervous system in a hurry.

You may be at the fork in the road called Decide. Good news: that is not a dead end. That is where you stop settling and start choosing the bigger life.

If you know something needs to change but you’re not sure what, that is exactly the kind of fork in the road that I help people navigate. You can learn more and book a conversation at TeachersinTransition.com.

And if this show has helped you, made you laugh, or made you feel a little less alone, there are plenty of ways to support it. I am need your support! Rate and review the podcast, share it with a fellow teacher, and honestly, just keep listening. That all matters.

And if you’d like to help this scrappy little indie podcast financially, you can do that for as little as three dollars a month. Those donations help with hosting, production, and keeping the wheels on this thing.

Until next time, be gentle with yourself. You may be paying a tax no one else can see.
 
 

👋 CONNECT WITH VANESSA

• 💌 Email: Vanessa@teachersintransition.com
• 📱 Call or Text: 512-640-9099
• 📅 Book a Free Discovery Call: teachersintransition.com/calendar
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That’s the podcast for today! If you liked this podcast, tell a friend, and don’t forget to rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Tune in weekly to Teachers in Transition where we discuss Job Search strategies as well as stress management techniques.  And I want to hear from you!  Please reach out and leave me a message at Vanessa@Teachersintransition.com  You can also leave a voicemail or text at 512-640-9099. 

I’ll see you here again next week and remember – YOU are amazing!