Last week, I had the privilege of doing a mini-residency as part of the Las Vegas Public Education Foundation Teacher Leadership Academy. It’s a solid chunk of time where I get to flex my pedagogical skills while building community with educators who I might not otherwise have a chance to work with. It’s weirder when I’m usually the only “current classroom teacher” facilitating sessions like this because these workshops tend to be led by folks who’ve already left the classroom.

In these sessions, I leave lots of open space in my “plan” to allow for teachable moments among adults. I flourish in those uncertain spaces where I know where we need to get to, but no one has any idea how we’ll get there. In one of those moments, we were discussing the obstacles of teacher leadership. Most of the attendees shared how their roles differed based on who you asked: students, peers, or administrators.

Ursela Gavin, National Board Certified Black educator, revealed how she had often been told she was doing too much. By my count, she facilitates about seven clubs with a full teaching program. In the back of my mind, the easy – and hypocritical – thing to have done is tell her that her colleagues were right. She was doing too much and I rather she not burn herself out too quickly because she needs to stay around for the long haul.

Hypocritical because I flew across the country during one of my vacation breaks to spend a full two days with dozens of educators with activities I planned out on my own.

Instead, I threw it back to the rest of the attendees: “How many of you have also been told you’re ‘doing too much’?” Almost everyone raised their hands in unison. I followed up with “See, some of this is truly systemic. I want to tell you to stop doing what you’re doing, but you also feel responsible for making sure these elements happen because our kids deserve.” I saw lots of nodding across the room.

We owe ourselves some moments of honesty, too. When we say our schools “lack resources,” it’s partially financial, but it’s also about the number of human beings and their capacity for the work we need to be done for and with students. How many adults can run the affinity club? How many adults will sacrifice a few hours after school to run the tech club, the newspaper club, or the soccer club? Why should the same adult who already volunteered to be an instructional club during school also the same adult running the tutoring program? In an ideal world, we’d have enough adults to evenly distribute these responsibilities. In our current world, there are several gaps worth addressing, and they all point to systemic deficiencies where we’re trying to use small bandages for wounds we should stitch up.

It’s not necessarily about some adults being lazier than others. It’s more about having enough people to provide our students with a more complete set of experiences to keep them engaged in their schools and the world around them.

The same ethic that drives some educators to take on multiple clubs can drive up teacher turnover as well. Those of us with large imaginations and big hearts might keep our ideals and expectations so high, we burn ourselves out of our careers that much quicker. That’s not the fault of those who simply work their hours and clock out. Schools around the world seem to juggle this better. So do wealthier schools. Every so often, so do schools that serve children in poverty, but those instances seem few and far between.

For those of us doing too much, having spaces that support us feels like a roll of the dice. For Gavin and others, we know our work brings value, even if we can’t see the seed blossom for another decade or so. The people who run our system should recognize those who do too much because, otherwise, for so many stakeholders, our schools as they stand would not be enough.