IN MY SHOES: Grade School Volunteer Burnout
Boston Globe columnist Joanna Weiss wonders, “Am I a terrible person for saying I no longer derive joy from volunteering in my daughter’s first grade class?”:
I realized this last week as I was helping, for the 10th or 12th time, with a weekly enterprise known as “math games.’’ The class is divided into groups of six, who sit at tables helmed by parents, taking part in some math-y activity. Every 15 minutes, a bell goes off and the kids rotate to the next table. Sometimes, a parent gets an actual game - bingo or somesuch - and things go reasonably well. Last week, I was handed a stack of worksheets and told to make the kids write equations, sorted along such lines as whether they added up to 10. …
It’s not that I haven’t gotten anything out of the experience. I have learned certain unexpected things about first graders, such as fact that they are obsessed with erasers. Seriously — they spend so much time erasing work that doesn’t meet their standards of perfection that the backs of their pencils are worn down to hard, pointed nubs. Among a pencil-wielding group of six, there is likely to be one functional eraser, which they fight over like lions at a kill. …
And yet, after decidedly diminishing returns, I doubt I’ll quit. There’s too much pressure to show up, in the form of guilt-inducing exhortations from the PTO - and the pervasive idea that the best parents are intimately involved in their kids’ lives.
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