The Burned Out B: Dear Teachers

When Following the Rules Doesn't Protect You: The Great Educational Lie

• Nicole • Season 1 • Episode 4

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What happens when the safety bargain you've been promised turns out to be a mirage? The burned-out bee tackles the generational lie at the heart of teacher burnout: follow the rules, and you'll be protected.

The reality? You're making an unconscious deal—your voice for a paycheck, your boundaries for team spirit, your nervous system for a lanyard—but the system never signed the contract. While teachers uphold their end of this bargain with dedication and sacrifice, their legitimate concerns get met with empty policies, gaslighting, and a resounding "we're following protocol." From ignored reports of aggressive student behavior to dismissal of unsafe classroom conditions, teachers find themselves shouting into a void while being told to just manage their classrooms better.

Most devastating is how this pattern morphs into self-blame. When reflection—a cornerstone of good teaching—becomes weaponized, teachers wonder if they're too sensitive or if one more restorative circle might solve everything. They script conversations like they're testifying before Congress, all while questioning their own reality. Meanwhile, administrators who genuinely believe in values like support and empathy fold when those values might require pushing back against policy, choosing system safety over human safety.

Real safety doesn't come from institutions that view teachers as disposable. It comes from boundaries, community, and the courage to say "I'm done trading my peace for a paycheck." Join our August 16th Dear Teachers workshop if your nervous system is fried and bubble baths aren't cutting it. Because when teachers aren't okay, students can't be okay either—and it's time we stopped pretending otherwise.


Join the workshop here: https://theburnedoutb.com/dear-teachers-workshop

Thanks for listening!

Connect with me on instagram: @theburnedoutb

I'd love for you to message me what you thought, what it made you think about, your reflections, and of course I want to know what's been coming up for you in the classroom! I will never name names...unless you ask me to!

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Burned Out Bee, dear teachers, the podcast for educators who are two seconds away from flipping a desk but still somehow remember to take attendance. Or maybe you didn't somehow remembered to take attendance, or maybe you didn't. I'm Nicole, the burned out bee, who's a former classroom teacher, curriculum builder, interrupter of bullshit and professional wearer of the I'm fine mask Around. Here we say the quiet parts out loud, we call out the systems that run on guilt, glitter and unpaid labor, and we absolutely do not accept toxic positivity as a wellness plan. Grab your lukewarm coffee, lock your classroom door and take a breath. You're home. Welcome back, dear teachers, to the show where we rip down the inspirational posters and name what's actually burning us out.

Speaker 1:

I'm Nicole, former teacher, full-time truth teller and a woman who once believed that the powers that be was the adult in the room. And today we're going to talk about the safety trap, that big fat generational lie that told us if you follow the rules, you will be safe. Spoiler, the only thing that got protected was the system. So let's talk about the lie that we inherited. Here's the bedtime story that so many of us were tucked in with If you go to college, you get your degree, you land a steady job and you follow the rules, work hard and with integrity, then in return, you will get safety, stability, enough income to go on one week vacation a year, a gold watch after 25 years and retirement parties with a Costco cake. Okay, well, first of all, there's no gold watch. We all know that, right.

Speaker 1:

But here's what else they forgot to mention. You are making a deal, your voice for a paycheck, your boundaries for team spirit and your nervous system for a lanyard and a data wall. And the kicker the system never signed the contract. You upheld your end. They ghosted. So what happens when you need help? We already know that. You don't get support. You get policy. We get an empty. How can we help with nothing behind it? You get we're following protocol, which is system speak for it's not our problem. You show up expecting backup and instead you get a PDF of rules that no one read until you needed them. You get admin giving you puppy dog eyes while they were quietly letting you down and, let's be honest, the rules were never there to protect you. They were there to protect them from you.

Speaker 1:

So why do we stay silent and how? How does the system count on that? We stay silent because we believed the fairy tale, the idealism, the thing that we all came for, the change that we could make. We stay silent because next year maybe that will be better, because this group of kids is just tough. Next year will be a little bit easier, even though we know two years down the road there's another tough group coming up, because there's new admin coming and because it's not forever. But silence isn't safety, obedience doesn't buy protection and burnout. It's not a system glitch, it's the main feature.

Speaker 1:

So let's go ahead and translate the gaslight of choice, the fallback you got to work on your classroom management Translated. That's your suffering is inconvenient to acknowledge, is inconvenient to acknowledge when you have reported yelling, maybe at other kids, maybe at you, cursing, cursing you out, desk flipping, death glares after hours, parent and student harassment, emotional trauma, walking around in a hoodie with a TikTok account that desperately, desperately needs to be addressed, while you're trying to focus on your content and get that across to 30 kids. And what do you get? Have you tried building rapport? This is a relationship kid, he just needs a relationship. I need more documentation. Well, I'm following our triage plan to a T. I'll talk to him. Okay, we all know how that goes. He's going to get a high five and a lollipop and head straight back to class. No, what you need is a break, even if it's just one day of ISI where you can run your class and the other 29 kids have the ability to focus. You need a day without chaos. What you need is not to be the entire trauma intervention team with a whiteboard marker team with a whiteboard marker.

Speaker 1:

So let's go through the top complaints that I get from teachers, the top places that they feel that they are ignored. First off, multiple reports about student aggression being ignored. Teachers filing several incident reports about physically or verbally aggressive students, and nothing changes. Then, when escalation happens, admin says well, we didn't have enough documentation to act. Okay, but we all saw that coming right. Can we acknowledge that we all saw that coming and that I've been screaming about it for the top of my lungs we didn't have enough documentation. Act is translated as you were shouting into a void while we covered our asses Right along with this one, and so I've combined them both gaslighting unsafe class placements when a student has made inappropriate or threatening statements.

Speaker 1:

Okay, here's one from my past. I don't think I can keep my hands off of her Woof, an admin puts them back in the same classroom without informing the teacher. How is she supposed to keep herself safe? Or him supposed to keep himself safe? And the response is well, due to privacy laws we couldn't tell you. Well, doesn't that directly affect me? The translation there is we value protecting ourselves over protecting you. All to do with the students.

Speaker 1:

Mold, broken heating and cooling, broken door locks, reported over and over and over. And teachers are told well, facilities has a backlog, just keep your window open. I personally I had a window on the side of my classroom door facing the hallway and I put in a facilities request about every time that we had a lockdown drill, because on that checklist we have so many checklists. On that checklist you got to close all of those blinds because what if somebody could see in? Well, there's just flat out were none on my window, they were broken. The brackets were there, but not like the actual blinds blinds. I had a facilities request in for five years. It never got done. Translation here we'll wait until it gets bad enough or until Channel 4 News cares.

Speaker 1:

Third, most commonly cited concern from teachers that I've worked with curriculum gaps and unreasonable mandates, teachers raising concerns about lack of planning time for multiple preps, chaotic pacing guys, mandatory tech rollouts, being forced to follow a student until they graduate if they have failed your course, right, being the responsible party for making sure that that kid who didn't do boo in class all year we got to make sure they pass. That's on you, teacher. Ah, we'll take it under advisement, or this is coming from the state, so the translation there is. You know, we heard you and now we're ignoring you. We offload system accountability by turning it into a personal moral burden.

Speaker 1:

Number four vacation day blackouts without warning. Teachers who have earned personal days but are suddenly told ah, you can't use them that week, it's a district blackout. Well, hold on, didn't I earn those? And what if I already have a sub scheduled, even if you've prepped for weeks? It gets labeled as a policy restriction Translation. You don't control your own time, even when it's earned. That's not support, that's erasure. And lastly, number five, and I thought I was the only one being denied leave for milestone life events.

Speaker 1:

A teacher plans to get married, takes time off months in advance, books a sub, preps lesson plans with that sub, just to make sure that students don't learn out on or don't miss out on one day of learning and responses. Oh yeah, we know that you have those vacation days, but that's not contract approved and if you go it will be unpaid and it will affect your retirement calculation when you've already covered every base that there is to cover translation. We don't care that. It's your wedding day, to which I say I understand if you have a policy, but do you think that that's right? I know that it's the rules, but is it the right thing to do? I think we get really confused over that, and I think we get really confused over that in systems.

Speaker 1:

More often than not, we fall back on policy rather than thinking about what is the actual right thing to do, and I don't mean just about a wedding, I mean about the disruptive students too, I mean about the lack of planning time too, all of it. What is the right thing to do? Because when teachers aren't okay, students aren't going to be okay. It's like that old saying, like if mom is not happy, nobody's happy, which, when we talk about it in terms of something like postpartum depression, we say if mom is not emotionally sound, if she doesn't have the tools to help her with this, then that child is going to have a harder time. Why wouldn't we apply that to teachers too?

Speaker 1:

Because the truth is that your energy extends in all directions from you by six feet. People around you can feel that, and if you're not okay, they can feel that too. How does that feel when they ignore it? And I know, I know that our teachers are not ignoring it. They're feeling the energy that students walk in with and they are responding to it. They are responding to it and they are responding to it with integrity. Integrity, but they're not given that same empathy, they're not given that same compassion. But y'all, they're humans too. We're humans too.

Speaker 1:

And here's the internal damage that no one talks about. You start wondering am I the problem? Maybe I'm too sensitive? Maybe I should have done another restorative circle? Maybe that would have helped my relationships. What you think? That one extra restorative circle, like you're gaslighting yourself now by the time you go to ask for help.

Speaker 1:

You've laid it out perfectly. You've created the ISI materials. You've prepped video lessons so that that student won't actually miss out on any learning if they choose to watch them. You've scripted your entire talk like you're going before Congress to go talk to your administrator. And all for what Manage your classroom better. That's not support, that's emotional whiplash, because by the time you ask, you already know that you can't handle this on your own. It's not working. You have tried everything and that leads us to the real Trojan horse of teacher guilt weaponized reflection.

Speaker 1:

We are trained to reflect like Olympic gymnasts. Every teacher credential program says it in some manner of reflect, refine, grow, reflect, refine, grow. It is dialed in, it is beaten, some would say. But here's the twist In a broken system, reflection becomes self-blame. A kid throws a chair. You ask what did I do wrong? You're trained to look inward when you should be looking at the system, and they count on that Because while you spiral in shame, the system gets to keep pretending that nothing's wrong. So when what you actually need is one damn day to breathe, one day with that student out of your classroom and in isi, so the other 29 kids can catch up.

Speaker 1:

You need a calm classroom. You need a calm classroom. You need a break from playing emotional triage. Nurse slash, academic coach, slash human shield, a sign that someone, anyone, sees what you are holding, and instead you get dismissed, gaslit. You may as well be handed a soggy ice pack, like, you know, any student that goes to the nurse with a headache, hoping they'll get sent home, because that's how you're viewed. It is the same energy.

Speaker 1:

And listen, here's what I don't believe. I don't believe that your admin are heartless and I don't believe that they don't care. I believe that they want to care. I believe that they say the right things because those are the values that they want to stand for Support, empathy, equity. They believe in those values in theory, but when it comes time to live those values, when living them might ruffle feathers or push back on policy or God forbid threaten their own perception of who they are or what they need to do to protect those that they are responsible for, they fold. They say my hands are tied. They choose system safety over human safety, and it's not usually malicious, it's fear, it's cowardice in compliant cosplay.

Speaker 1:

But here's the thing If you say you care, I need to see it. If you say you support teachers, then back me up. Don't throw out a sympathy nod and then walk away, because the rules say that you can, because values aren't what you say when the mic is on. They're what you do when shit hits the fan. And if you're not willing to live those values when it actually costs you something, then they're not values, they're branding, and as a teacher, as a human, I'm done with branding. I need truth and I need backup, and I need you to stop calling it support if it only exists when it's convenient, because real safety doesn't come from systems that see you as disposable. It comes from boundaries. It comes from saying I'm done trading my piece for a paycheck and something has to change. Let's stop begging for backup from a system that's already shown us its priorities. Let's start building real safety in here, inside you. Let's start building real safety with each other, with other people who say what they mean and mean what they say. Other people who say what they mean and mean what they say.

Speaker 1:

Here's what I'm curious about and I would love it if you would message me on Instagram or email buzz at theburnedoutbeecom. When did you first realize that following the rules wouldn't save you? Where are you still hoping that the system will come through, even though it never has Anybody? Student loans, anybody, student loan forgiveness, different system and what would real safety feel like in your body and where are you willing to build it without waiting for permission? This is exactly what we're unpacking in the August 16th, dear Teachers workshop.

Speaker 1:

If your nervous system is fried and the bubble baths aren't cutting it, if you've been stuck in the survive the system mode, come join us. This is your invite. Go ahead to the show notes, where our website is linked. You can go sign up right now. Spots are limited. But real safety, it doesn't come from your job, it comes from truth, tools and people who have your back for real. We'll chat with you next time, bees. If this episode dragged any skeletons out of your filing cabinet, just know same Thanks for listening to the Burned Out Bee. Dear teachers, if it hit you in the soul or in the sarcasm gland, send it to your teacher bestie. You know the one. Follow the show. Smash that subscribe button like it's a broken copy machine and come hang out on Instagram at the burned out bee, where the real talk continues. And remember you weren't meant to be a martyr with a lanyard. You were meant to rise. See you next time, bee.