What Teachers Can Learn from The Menopause Manifesto
Ms. Alvarez had taught eighth grade for nineteen years and prided herself on never losing her patience in a classroom of thirty. Then came a term when heat crept up her neck mid-lesson, her memory for names went patchy, and she snapped at a student over something trivial, then cried in the supply closet at lunch. She assumed she was simply failing at a job she'd always been good at. A colleague, further along the same road, finally said the word out loud: perimenopause. Ms. Alvarez had spent her career explaining photosynthesis and fractions to children without ever being taught the basics of her own body. She started reading, plainly and factually, and the classroom got calmer before her symptoms even changed.
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 Lesson Plan Your Body Didn't Give You
Just as you would never let a student walk into an exam without the material, plain understanding of what is actually happening physiologically during this transition replaces classroom-adjacent dread with something closer to a lesson plan: known stages, known symptoms, real questions to bring to a doctor.
Teachers sometimes apply their research skills to everything except themselves, treating their own body as the one subject they never assign themselves to study.
Pick one specific symptom you have been ignoring and write a single plain-language question about it, the way you would write a learning objective, before your next appointment.
Grading the Staffroom Remedies
Staffrooms pass around remedies the way they pass around lesson ideas, often with real warmth but no evidence behind them, and a teacher's instinct to fact-check a source before using it in class deserves to be turned toward these well-meant suggestions too.
Trusted colleagues can feel like more credible sources than they are, simply because the advice comes wrapped in kindness and shared experience.
Before adopting a colleague's remedy, ask the question you would ask a student's citation: where did this claim come from, and who actually checked it.
Office Hours With Your Own Doctor
Teachers negotiate constantly with a system, principals, schedules, substitute coverage, and that same persistence applies to medical care in a system that has historically under-trained clinicians on this transition; showing up prepared with specific symptoms is the equivalent of arriving at office hours with real questions.
The same person who will fight for a struggling student's accommodations often minimizes her own symptoms to a rushed doctor.
Book appointments outside the school day when possible, and bring one written list of symptoms so a short visit still produces a real answer.
Teaching Through the Transition, Not Around It
Reframing this as a normal stage, not a crisis to survive quietly until retirement, matters for teachers especially, since the profession already asks them to model resilience for young people. A teacher who understands and discusses her own transition plainly, without shame or performance, is still teaching, just a different subject: that a body changing over time is ordinary, survivable, and not something to hide.
The instinct to keep pushing through the school day (professional performance) can conflict with the slower work of pursuing real medical evaluation (advocacy), since taking time away from students feels like letting people down. Treat a scheduled appointment as part of sustaining the classroom long-term, not a defection from it.
Name one thing, honestly
What is one symptom you have been managing silently in front of your students that you have never said out loud to a doctor?
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
Book appointments outside the school day when possible, and bring one written list of symptoms so a short visit still produces a real answer.