Coping with stress: my dilemma and relief measures

As someone who goes through one thing or another, being stressed can't be overruled, and it's more like an avenue to know our limits, how tired we are, or when we need a break or should rest. Personally, I've been going through a huge amount of stress lately, and these have affected almost all of my other activities, and today I'll share what it's like with y'all.

My major source of stress in recent days has been my offline job. As a teacher, the examination period is always an overly engaging one that consumes our time and energy. It could have even been a minimal task if the population of the students in one's school isn't much, but for someone like me who taught in a school with high popularity and almost a thousand students to attend to personally, it's always a hell of a task.

The stressful activities began ever since the students began their examinations. It's disheartening to realize I had to supervise throughout the examination period, even though there were some teachers who wouldn't supervise for a single day. Even though I tried to call their attention to that, I was told that supervising examinations is always arranged based on hierarchy, and since I'm a junior staff member, I worked throughout while the senior teachers did nothing.

Even though I fell sick during the examination and told them about my plight, no one was asked to take my place. That did get me angry, but I can't blame them, because had I sat at home and called to inform them about my poor health, they would have looked for a replacement, but seeing me made them feel it wasn't really serious, so I even did the invigilation despite being down with cough, catarrh, and malaria.

Now fast forward a few days after the examination; students have vacated and are now on break, but we teachers now have the ambiguous task of marking all of their script and still recording it in three different broadsheets and one cloud storage/educational application software that'll help us generate each student's results and position.

Well, dealing with this type of stress is somewhat different from how we can deal with other stress because, as much as I want to get over marking and recording each student's score and results, I'll still need to pay attention to how well they've performed. I've seen several teachers delegate some of their script to some brilliant students to help them mark.

but I don't see it as something that's an idea, so I'll rather mark it by myself or give it to an elderly person who isn't a student to help me out after showing them my marking guide. To make this possible, I already spoke with one of the young ladies in my community, and she promised to come help me out tomorrow, so I believe that will ease the pressure a little.

As regards whether it's working out well or not, well, I'm trying my best to get it over with on time so I can rest and have enough time for other activities, but in as much as I would have reduced the pace at which I do it daily so it wouldn't be cumbersome, yet we've been given a Deadline by which each teacher must be done with everything, that means I'll still need to put myself under pressure to finish everything up.

I can actually get Rid of what is causing the stress, but what it will take to get it off on time is more stress. In order to get rid of it, for now, I've invited some friends to help me out with some of the marking and recording, and I believe that at the end of the day, It'll not just reduce the amount of stress I'm going through alone but also eradicate it to the point where I won't have to go through it again until the next section examination.

That's about all on the stress I'm going through presently and the method I'm devising to curb it to a minimal amount, and the write-up was inspired by the Hive Learner Community Features prompt.

NOTE: All thumbnails used in this article were designed by me on canva.

Thanks so much for your support and time, stay bless.