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If I can be very honest with you all, I'm gonna beat them anyways.
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I wasn't really asking, I was kind of telling.
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Most of us are professionals at saying that we are fine and we're not.
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Education needs people who are truly present, not just in the building.
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I'm Ember DeShazer, and welcome to Homeroom Attendance.
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Your C listen.
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What's going on, Pod?
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Welcome to Homeroom Attendance.
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I'm your host, Eber DeShazer, and today I am asking, are you present or are you absent?
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Let's begin.
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I want you to count something this week.
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Or let's go back to this last week and think if we can think through and count it.
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How many times count how many times someone in your building asks, How are you doing?
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And you answer, I'm fine.
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Whether it was in the hallway on those drive-by greetings, or you both blow past it, hey, how are you doing?
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I'm fine.
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You just both keep walking.
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Maybe it's the teacher's lounge, maybe it's the car line, maybe it's the staff meeting, maybe it's in the teacher's lounge where you're grabbing a cup of coffee.
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Now count how many of those times you actually were fine.
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We have built a whole culture in education around that one word.
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Teachers say it to each other, staff say it to the principal, the principal says it to the school board, the kids watch us all say it.
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RAN's 26, 2026 survey found that 55% of teachers deal with frequent job-related stress.
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For similar working adults outside of education, that number is 34%.
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And 18% of teachers said they were likely to leave their job by the end of last school year.
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So if you put those numbers next to each other, this means that someone in your building said I'm fine and didn't mean it.
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Maybe it was you.
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Maybe it was them.
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Maybe it was both of us.
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Um what I would like to do, pause here for a second.
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If you are listening on a podcast platform, please, please, please leave a review.
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If you're watching on YouTube, smash a little thumb button.
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Uh it helps us keep in front of dynamic educators like yourself.
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But if I can be very
Load full transcript
honest with you all, I'm gonna be it in anyways.
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I wasn't really asking, I was kind of telling.
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Most of us are professionals at saying that we are fine and we're not.
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I want you to introduce you to someone.
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Her name is Miss Carter.
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Miss Carter is in her eighth year of teaching.
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She is the first car in the lot.
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She covers classes when a sub doesn't show.
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She is the one new teachers go to when they are drowning.
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Somebody passes Miss Carter in the hallway and they say, Miss Carter, how you doing?
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She smiles.
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I'm fine, blessed and highly favored.
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Everyone laughs, everyone keeps moving.
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Meanwhile, Miss Carter is sleeping five hours a night.
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Miss Carter is exhausted.
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Miss Carter sits in her car on Monday mornings for 10 minutes before she can even walk into work.
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And back in November, Miss Carter quietly updated her resume because she's exhausted.
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Nobody knows.
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And every time someone asks Miss Carter, How are you doing?
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She says, I'm fine.
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And every time that she said fine, they believed her because she was so good at it.
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So why do we do that?
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Part of it is who we are.
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Educators are caregivers.
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We are wired to take care of everyone else first, and admitting that we're not okay can feel like we're taking something away from the kids.
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The other part is that nobody wants to be the one who can't handle it.
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You look down the hallway and everyone else seems to have it all together.
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So you keep your face on too.
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What I've learned is that they're looking down the hallway at you thinking the exact same thing.
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And all these other people in the building are looking down the hallway at you like he or she has got it together.
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And we don't.
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News flash.
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The majority of adults don't have it together.
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Some of us are hanging on by a thread.
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Fine, the word fine, air quotes, for those that can't see me, costs you something.
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46% of teachers said their job left them too tired for a personal life.
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For similar adults, 13% that's only 13%.
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Fine at school turns into empty at home.
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And the people we love the most get whatever is left.
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How many of you have pulled into your driveway after school and just sat there, engine off, phone in your lap, quiet, no music for five to ten minutes?
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Those minutes in the car are what all those fines are adding up to.
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It costs the kids too.
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Students read us better than we think.
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When the adults in our building are pretending, kids pick up that pretending is the rule.
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Then we wonder why a student tells us everything is fine before everything falls apart.
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They have learned from watching us.
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Our kids at home have learned from watching us, pretending that everything is fine.
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The teacher who said fine in September is often the one whose resignation letter surprises everyone come March.
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That's Mrs.
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Carter.
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It shouldn't have been a surprise.
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We just never got the real answer from her when we asked.
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Blessed and highly favored, dear.
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We all know that teacher that says that.
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But is that actually where they're at?
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Yes, we may be blessed and highly favored, but fine is not fine if you're not fine.
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I want people to understand that I can't, or I want you to understand that I can't change your schedule from behind this microphone.
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But you control more of it than you may think.
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Start by changing the question that we ask.
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How are you?
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Is a greeting.
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Nobody treats it like a real question, so nobody gives a real answer.
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It's just like our default.
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You get an elevator, like, hey, how are you doing?
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Hey, I'm I'm fine.
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How are you?
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Like that is just it's like a salutation for us.
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So try something more specific when you're walking past teachers.
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Ask them, you know, what has been the heaviest part of your week?
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Were you really on a scale of one to ten?
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Sometimes we have to ask the honest questions so we can get the honest answers from the people that are around us.
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A specific question tells the other person you
actually want to hear the answer.
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Try asking what's something you need right now that you haven't asked for.
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Then wait.
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Don't feel a silence.
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The first answer is probably gonna be nothing.
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I'm good.
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And stay there for a second longer.
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Because that second answer that comes after that is usually the real.
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Then give one person the honest answer.
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A few episodes, maybe three or four episodes back, talked about you are doing enough.
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I talked about us finding one person who gets the honest version of us every single day.
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This is where that pays off.
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You don't have to tell the whole staff lounge that there's a challenge.
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You just need that one person in your building.
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And when that person asks, you have to tell them the truth.
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Now let's talk about the entire building because this can't rely on one good listener in the hallway.
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It has to be built in how our schools feel and how our schools run.
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If you lead anything, maybe it's a grade level team, a department, a whole school, whatever it is, maybe it's just your classroom.
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You have to go first.
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People won't be honest with you until they have watched you be honest with them.
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So I want you to picture a principal at that October staff meeting.
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Before she touches the agenda, she says, I want to be honest with you all.
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This month has been difficult for me.
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I've been taking work home, I've been short with people that I care about, and if I've been short with you, I am sorry.
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Then she sits down, the entire room goes quiet.
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And then after the meeting, over the next couple days, a couple teachers stop, a couple people and staff members from building stop in her office.
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Each one of them has a version that sounds like, I've been feeling the same.
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So one honest minute in front of an entire room gave everyone else permission to be honest and a space to say, your feelings are validated.
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Your honesty can be, can be um safe here.
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We are here to support you.
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Open your team meeting with a two-minute round where everyone answers one real question.
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Nobody fixes everything.
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We are just listening.
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If you're not in charge of that meeting, you can do this with your grade level team or at your lunch table.
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And when someone finally gives you the real answer, we have to stop trying to rush to fix it.
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Just say, thank you for telling me.
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As educators, as people, oftentimes when people have a problem, our initial instinct is that we have to fix and solve that problem.
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In this moment, I'm not asking you to fix it.
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I'm just asking you to hear it and acknowledge.
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Thank you for telling me that.
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A building where the adults can tell the truth about how they're doing is a building where the kids can too.
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So this week, I want you to notice when you say fine, even though you're not.
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And I want you to notice when you hear it, because I guarantee you you hear it multiple times a day and we don't even realize it.
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And then I want you to pick one person to ask that better question to.
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And here's where I'll leave you for this episode.
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If the people in your building told you the truth tomorrow, what do you think that you would hear?
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And the follow-up question is what would you tell them?
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If this episode landed for you, uh send it to someone in your building, share this with an educator, um, like, subscribe, leave reviews.
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Again, that always gets me up an algorithm for more educators like yourself to find us.
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But I am encouraging you if you're not doing fine, stop telling people that you're doing.
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Thank you for spending this time with me.
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You have been present for homeroom attendance.
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Class is dismissed.