Slowing the Pace

What my fitness tracker taught me about teacher sustainability

My heartrate data from 21 April 2025

“It’s enough to drive one perfectly frantic.”

–Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest.

At 7:15 am on Monday, April 21, 2025, I arrived in my classroom and started my usual preparations for the week. Nothing special.

But as my first students arrived and I began our lesson, my fitness tracker buzzed, rewarding me with a graphic of a lightning bolt. The school day had just begun, and I’d already met my daily goal for “active minutes with strenuous — moderate-to-intense — activity.”

I’m the first to admit that I’m not especially “fit.” I only bought a fitness tracker in the first place to see if biometric data would back up my hunches about whether or not I had a good night’s sleep.

Now this tool had alerted me to another use: tracking my anxiety via heart rate spikes.

At this moment, my heart was racing at 133 beats per minute (bpm). According to my tracker, I was in the “Moderate Zone,” equivalent to a “high intensity interval training class.” But this was AP Literature, not a spin class!

I reminded students of our discussion goals and sat outside the students’ circle as their Socratic discussion began. As I took notes on each learner’s proficiency, I also kept watch on my heart rate.

At the end of the class period, I found that I’d spent that whole 65-minute class in the “Moderate” to “Vigorous” heart rate zones, most of which I spent visibly inactive, sitting on a stool and watching students discuss “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

My next step was what we all do when our bodies misbehave: hello Google. I closed the tab with a new self-diagnosis of “tachycardia” — an elevated resting heart rate. According to the Cleveland Clinic, “tachycardia that happens in response to emotional stress and only lasts a few minutes is not harmful.”

On a hunch, I looked back at my fitness app’s history and noticed a pattern: my heart rate was elevated for an average of 4 hours each school day — hardly a few not-harmful minutes! Mondays were consistently the worst. In contrast, on a typical weekend, my heart raced for less an hour per day.

Even worse, this Monday my tracker had detected a rate of 167 bpm at one point, which put me in my tracker’s highest heart rate zone: the “Peak Zone.” I was in the “Peak zone” ….while I was… doing regular teacher stuff in my classroom at 7:40 am on a Monday morning?

According to my tracker, time in this zone is “pushing your body to the highest intensity, like sprinting.” The tracker also mentions that “[t]oo much time in this zone can cause strain on your body.”

What could possibly be happening that my body was confusing a typical school start with an all-out sprint? And what could I do about it?

I peeked out my classroom door and saw my principal at the end of my hall working from his standing cart (hooray!), so I popped down to let him know that I was probably dying or having a nervous breakdown (phrased slightly more professionally) and told him that I needed a mental/heart-health day. With his full support (another appreciative hooray!) I returned to my room to write sub plans, post assignments to Google Classroom, update slides and handouts, run to the copier with fingers crossed that it would function, think briefly about the massive “pile” of digital work that I needed to assess, and teach my remaining classes.

At the end of the school day, I checked my tracker app again. While the “peak zone” spike wasn’t repeated, I had spent over 5 hours that day with an elevated heart rate — spiking first in the morning when I started getting ready for school and finally dropping off within an hour after the final school bell — and I had burned, in the app’s estimation, over 3000 calories. According to Google’s AI, “[b]urning 3,000 calories in a single day requires intense and prolonged physical activity, likely involving several hours of high-intensity cardio.”

I kept coming back to that same question: how was I getting 5 hours of “high-intensity cardio” results while sitting, standing, and pacing around my classroom?

That’s when I thought about how my brain and I function on school days. From the moment I wake up to the moment I leave my classroom, I’m thinking about EVERYTHING that I have to do that day/ week/ month/ year and how far behind I inevitably am. (I felt my anxiety building as I typed that last sentence and had to stop writing to do a few rounds of box breathing.)

How can a veteran teacher feel so much stress and be, objectively– according to month-old set of ungraded summaries in my Google Classroom queue — so far behind?

At the start of this school year, when I started thinking about sustainability in teaching and learning with the Madison Writing Project, I listed all of the new responsibilities and tasks that have been added to the teacher workload at my school over the past 20 years. I’ll spare us the itemized list (for one, because I’d like to go a few more minutes without needing my “rescue” breathing), but it is a formidable one.

However, I have no nostalgia for the practices of 2005 because many of those added responsibilities help students. For example, 20 years ago, someone who missed class had to check the “absent binder” after they returned to find out how to catch up on their learning. Now, I post every material and instruction a student might need in Google Classroom, accessible 24/7 from almost anywhere on the planet. And, if that isn’t enough, I’m always just an email away for specific questions. And I use an app to request students for STAT who need more help. And after posting and emailing and requesting, my prep period is over and an entire school day goes by and I still haven’t glanced at those ungraded summaries.

To quote Oscar Wilde, “It’s enough to drive one perfectly frantic.” Which, I suppose, in my case, it has.

So what’s my solution?

On my mental/heart health sick day, to see whether school was my problem or if I was in a constant state of tachycardia, I tried an experiment. First, to rule out my caffeine consumption as the reason for my panic, I consumed the same amount of caffeine at the same intervals.

Then, I tracked my heart rate all day while listening to music, doing light chores, writing this post, and puttering around the house in a state of (what I hoped was) greater mindfulness than I possessed at school. And my tracker showed that during those same school hours (but not physically in the school space), my heart reached a high of only 112 beats per minute. Not even a “moderate” heart rate. So caffeine isn’t my primary problem.

I’m no doctor, but I know that these heart rate spikes that I’m having at school (and the repressed panic they represent) aren’t helping me, either as a teacher or as a human being. Neither is the binary existence that tracking my heart rate over these past two days has revealed: school = human ON, not-school = human off.

The end of April may seem a bit too late to make a change for the school year, but if the daffodils can start over in April, so can I.

I can be more mindful of what my own body is telling me and stop to breathe as soon as I start to spiral, rather than waiting until my tracker congratulates me for sustaining a state of panic.

I can practice radical acceptance, both in setting realistic goals and in forgiving myself for everything I’m not able to accomplish by the time the last bell rings.

I can remember that I am a good teacher no matter my productivity and that I am an even better teacher when I care for myself more than I care about my to-do list.

I can deliberately slow the pace of my school day and of my heart.

And maybe I can drink a little less caffeine. Especially on Mondays.