Word: burnouts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Once, hardly anyone except a Graham Greene character could manage such Gethsemanes of exhaustion. Today, burnout is a syndrome verging on a trend. The smell of psychological wiring on fire is everywhere. The air-traffic controllers left their jobs in part, they said, because the daily tension tended to scorch out their circuits (the primitive "flee-or-fight" reaction to danger squirted charges of adrenaline into bodies that had to remain relatively immobile, tethered by duty to scope and computer...
...Burnout runs through the teaching profession like Asian flu-possibly because it depresses people to be physically assaulted by those they are trying to civilize. Two years ago, Willard McGuire, president of the National Education Association, said that burnout among teachers "threatens to reach hurricane force if it isn't checked soon." Social workers and nurses burn out from too much association with hopelessness. Police officers burn out. Professional athletes burn out. Students burn out. Executives burn out. Housewives burn out. And, as every parent knows, there usually comes a moment in late afternoon when baby burnout occurs...
...became involved in peace work. "I did a 72-hour vigil and fast with Mobilization for Survival at Faneuil Hall, and that was an introduction to a tradition of opposition to nuclear weapons. That really led me in another direction." The intensity of his involvement also introduced him to "burnout" by the middle of his sophomore year. "I started realizing that from seven in the morning until one the next morning (I was) spending most of my time calling people or going to meetings or working out at the jail. Studies got squeezed in. I couldn't continue that...
...Teacher burnout" indeed. What American education needs is more grit and determination and less weeping and wailing. Too many teachers have been coddled too long. Test every one of them. They should either measure up or flunk right out of the classroom...
Beyond their prismatic gift for tint and shading the editors of Time have a real talent for discovering anguish. the illustrating example abounds--a teaser for the cover story on "Help--Teachers Can't Teach" tells of one teacher who "suffered a literal case of 'teacher burnout." Returning from lunch one day, he found flames leaping from his classroom window." Another mother despairs, "How do you tell your chid that contrary to what the teacher says, pin and pen are not homonyms?" But virtue lives on in some corners. One teacher "scrubs the desks in her classroom herself and sweeps...