During one of the two different conferences I’ve attended this weekend (oh, life), I’ve been able to listen to multiple wise speakers — writing is giving me a chance to internalize what they’ve shared and take what I need from it. Here’s hoping I can look back at this another day and remind myself of the learning, too!

The wise speaker on my mind today is Leah Marone, a speaker, trainer, and clinician on mental wellness. She spoke with our Teacher of the Year cohort via Zoom on Friday — and if you’re rolling your eyes a bit behind the computer screen, I get you! Being lectured about self-care rarely actually results in any care happening. This session was much more self-reflective and practical than that.

The piece I took away from Leah’s discussion has to do with boundaries. So much of the stress, frustration, and burnout in our lives comes from people crossing our boundaries — whatever limits we’ve put on our physical space, our emotional space, or our time. Leah pointed out that when this happens constantly, it creates the craving for constant stimulation: we’re used to something popping up at every moment, so when we actually do find space for ourselves, there’s an immediate instinct to fill it.

Ouch. Yeah, that definitely describes me, as well as many teachers I know. “People crossing our boundaries” is practically in the job description: as a teacher, someone needs us at every second of every day, and they’re usually little people just learning what a boundary is. It’s guaranteed that ours are crossed dozens of times in a day.

Some of those boundaries may not matter. (I do not care if you have your shoes off in class, so long as your feet don’t smell and we don’t have a fire drill. Live your life.)

Some of them really do, and really bother us. Her takeaway was this: we can take care of ourselves by recognizing and reinforcing our boundaries, which means knowing how we will respond when someone passes those limits.

Case study: the snack basket.

For many years, I have kept a small, nonperishable, inexpensive basket of snacks under my desk for students who need them. People have bad days, miss lunch, get low blood sugar — no problem. A furtive conversation and a granola bar slipped into a hand later, class goes on.

Until this year.

Somehow, word has gotten out that I am The Snack Lady. Suddenly, students I don’t even know are popping into my room constantly — before school, during classes, on my plan, with lunch trays in hand, on their way to the bus — and asking if they can have a snack. It’s caught me flatfooted, honestly: the answer to my students was always yes, because we had some trust established. That’s not the case with these snack scavengers.

Thinking about it, I’m sorting out which boundary was crossed, and how I need to reinforce it for my own sanity.

It’s certainly not about the food itself: I toss an extra box of fruit snacks in my cart at Aldi every other week, so this is not exactly gourmet. If a student needs it, I want them to have it. That may be the key boundary here: need.

Students in my classroom have the understanding (and I have the trust in them) that they ask for a snack when they truly need one. Not because they’re bored, or trying to get out of class, or because they’d rather have that than a real lunch. Between this new crowd of requesters and me, there isn’t that trust, or that understanding: they haven’t been here while we set the norm. They may genuinely believe that I just give out snacks. Complete sentence.

This week, I’m going to try re-setting the boundary in a way I won’t have to actively reinforce it. When the strange “Can I have a snack?” questioner walks in, my order of questions is going to be:

1. Are you supposed to be somewhere else/be doing something else right now?
2. Do you need one?

If the answers, in order, are “no” and “yes,” we’re good to go. Anything else, and sorry, you gotta walk on. As time goes on, I may even relocate the snack bin, and write the questions on it. If there’s something there and it’s a need, great. If the bin is empty for the week, bummer — I’ll refill it sometime soon.

It might offer some organic chances to talk about community care, and it might offer the same chances to talk about the tragedy of the commons. Either way, it will give me the chance to quit worrying about teenagers and snacks for a while!