What Teachers Can Learn from How to Be Sick
Renata Osei taught tenth-grade history and had missed exactly four sick days in eleven years, a fact she mentioned the way other people mention marathons. A chronic fatigue condition changed that math. Some mornings her voice gave out by second period, and she rationed energy at the whiteboard like a battery she could watch drain. She wrote sub plans anyway rather than call out, worried a stranger reading them badly would cost students a day they could not afford to lose. One Friday she taught through a flare so severe she barely remembered the lesson, then sat in her car ashamed less of the illness than of how relieved she felt no one had noticed. She wanted a way to teach well without disappearing into her classroom's needs entirely.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
The extra grading you do on yourself
Bernhard's book separates a condition's real limits from the added suffering of resisting them, and teachers often carry that resistance as private grading: a harsher score than any administrator would give. Wishing the flare had waited until summer break does not change it; it only adds shame to fatigue already present. Naming that scorekeeping as optional frees a teacher to plan around today's actual capacity instead of fighting it.
Accepting a hard day's limits should not mean never mentioning worsening symptoms to a doctor.
Before first period, name one sentence of self-judgment about today's capacity, and set it aside without needing it to be false.
Planning the lesson around today's actual voice and energy
The book's present-moment practice asks readers to work from real current capacity rather than a remembered baseline. For a teacher, that means building today's lesson around today's actual voice and stamina, not a healthier semester's version of themselves. This works alongside a treating physician's ongoing care, since pacing supports medical treatment rather than replacing it.
Treating today's low capacity as permanent can become a reason to stop pursuing better treatment.
Each morning, choose one lesson element you can drop if your energy runs out, and name it before class starts.
Grading yourself the way you'd grade a struggling student
Teachers extend patience to a struggling student without a second thought, then judge themselves for the same struggle. The book's self-compassion practice asks a teacher to offer that fairness inward, treating a body managing illness the way a fair grader treats a student under real constraints. Equanimity here reduces suffering around the condition; it does not treat the condition itself, and calm is not proof that attitude alone fixes an underlying illness.
Self-compassion turns into isolation if it stops a teacher from asking for real accommodation.
Write the note you would leave a struggling student about their effort this week, then read it as addressed to you.
Staying part of the staff room, not just the classroom
Teaching can be isolating even in good health, and illness deepens it by cutting the hallway chats and after-school moments that make a staff feel like colleagues, not coworkers behind separate doors. The book's closing argument is that connection has to be rebuilt around new limits rather than mourned as lost. That might mean a short message instead of a long conversation, or one staff event instead of all of them, so the classroom does not become a teacher's entire world.
The tension for teachers sits between honoring today's real capacity and staying present for students who need consistency. Canceling too readily can erode trust in a classroom, while never adjusting burns a teacher out in ways that eventually cost students more. Holding both means building smaller, sustainable versions of presence: a shorter but clearer lesson instead of a full one delivered exhausted, an honest heads-up instead of silent struggle. The goal is teaching that survives the semester, not one graded against a fully healthy year.
Name one thing, honestly
- Where are you grading your own limits more harshly than you would grade a student's? - What would a smaller version of tomorrow's lesson look like planned for your actual energy? - Who in your building could you ask for real accommodation instead of pushing through alone?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Write the note you would leave a struggling student about their effort this week, then read it as addressed to you.