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Why You Shouldn’t Work Through Your Lunch Break

You deserve to put yourself first and recharge yourself for the rest of the day

Ryan Fan
4 min readOct 8, 2021
Photo by Eiliv-Sonas Aceron on Unsplash

When I was a young, new teacher (I’m still young, I’m just not as new), I worked through my lunch break. I needed to be productive and doing things at all times. Everyone worked through lunch, right?

Often I would also have students in my classroom eat their lunch to build a bigger bond with me. I felt like a great teacher to devote my lunch period to my students while my more veteran and seasoned colleagues selfishly left the building and took their lunch away from their students. That meant I was a more committed teacher than them, right?

Well, I was wrong.

It worked well for the first month of my teaching career. But it soon led me to get burned out and completely exhausted at the end of the day. Not to mention I became less productive at the end of the day and fell asleep the moment I hit home.

That mode of working was completely unsustainable.

Now, during my lunch break, I refuse to work. Most of the time, I refuse to even be in my school building. I will leave the building and take the time for myself, sitting in my car, going on social media, and playing mindless games on my phone. I will do whatever…

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Ryan Fan
Ryan Fan

Written by Ryan Fan

Believer, Baltimore City IEP Chair, and 2:35 marathon runner. Diehard fan of “The Wire.”

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