A gleaner is not a harvester. In agrarian societies, gleaners entered the field only after the harvest was complete, collecting what remained. Collecting what machinery missed, what labor deemed inefficient, what fell outside the logic of yield. Gleaning assumed scarcity rather than abundance and responsibility rather than reward. It was work defined not by beginnings, but by endings. Work defined by attention to what would otherwise be abandoned.
This distinction has become increasingly central to how I understand my work in education. Much of my career has unfolded after the system had already passed through. I've spent years working with students whose trajectories were nonlinear, whose needs did not fit neatly within institutional timelines, and whose success depended less on acceleration than on sustained presence. In Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s Gleaners, End of Day, I recognize not only the posture of that work, but its moral location. The figures are bent beneath a fading light, gathering what remains once efficiency has done its work. Teaching, for me, has often felt like labor undertaken at precisely this hour.
It is from this position that the research of Christina Maslach has given me language equal to my experience. Maslach defines burnout as “a psychological syndrome emerging as a prolonged response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job." Importantly, she insists that burnout is not a failure of character or resilience. “Burnout is not a problem of people,” she writes, “but of the social environment in which people work." That framing matters. It allows experience to be examined without collapsing into blame.
Maslach identifies three core dimensions of burnout: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization or cynicism, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment. In later work, she and her colleagues extended this model by identifying six domains of job–person fit (workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values), arguing that burnout arises predictably when misalignment across these domains becomes chronic. What has struck me most forcefully is how precisely these domains map onto my own professional history: not as isolated crises, but as cumulative conditions shaped by circumstance.
Workload was the most visible site of misalignment. When I began my career, the work I now do was distributed across multiple people: teachers and paraprofessionals serving Flex, Missouri Option, and night school. Over time, those positions were reassigned or eliminated through attrition. The work itself did not diminish. It was passed to me. Expectations for outcomes remained unchanged or increased. Because I continued to meet those expectations, the redistribution became normalized. Maslach notes that “emotional exhaustion represents the basic individual stress dimension of burnout," but in my experience, exhaustion did not present as collapse. It presented as functioning too well for too long, depletion masked by competence.
This strain was compounded by diminished control. Being physically off site meant that students were often assigned to me without notice and without the information necessary to support them effectively. Requests for information were ignored or denied. I was excluded from conversations about placement, discipline, and intervention. On paper, my supervisor had little authority over my students and no consistent presence in my workspace. Maslach and Leiter argue that “a lack of control over one’s work is strongly associated with burnout,” because it converts expertise into liability. I adapted by improvising. By building informal networks, asking individual teachers for help, and working around systems that did not include me. This was not resistance. It was survival under constraint.
The domain of reward revealed a subtler misalignment. One year, I was a finalist for a regional teaching award. It was the closest I had come to formal recognition, and I allowed myself to hope. When the award went to a teacher from an elite private school, the disappointment lingered. Over time, reflection helped me release jealousy and genuinely celebrate others’ success. It also clarified a structural reality Maslach describes succinctly: “When rewards are insufficient—whether financial, institutional, or social—people feel devalued." Recognition tends to follow visibility and prestige rather than labor that occurs at the margins. The absence of reward was not personal; it was patterned.
Community proved fragile over time. As the administrators who hired me moved on, being off site meant repeatedly explaining why my program existed at all. Twice, that vulnerability crystallized into prolonged uncertainty. Once, I went an entire semester without new students being assigned, reliving an earlier experience of being phased out during the Great Recession. Another time, a building transition left me professionally isolated, nominally assigned to a staff that had moved elsewhere, supervised by someone who never came to the building. Maslach emphasizes that burnout accelerates when social connections erode: “People thrive in communities and suffer when those connections are broken.” My experience confirms this. What mitigated burnout was not policy, but reconnection. It was being seen again as part of a professional whole.
The domain of fairness was most starkly tested when a student of mine died in a tragic accident. An administrator called to ask if I was okay. I said I was coping. No counselors came. No administrators checked on my students. I attended the visitation as the sole representative of the school, standing with students and family in silence. I do not interpret this moment as neglect born of indifference. It was ambiguity of responsibility under strain. Yet Maslach is clear that fairness is not only about outcomes, but about process and presence. “Perceived unfairness,” she notes, “is a powerful source of cynicism and disengagement.” In that moment, institutional care was absent, and the burden fell, again, on the person still in the field.
Throughout all of this, my values remained aligned with students, even as institutional priorities narrowed to graduation metrics. I accept the necessity of those metrics. I also know that each student I have helped cross the stage did so against significant odds. Often, I have been the only keeper of their stories—their setbacks, their resilience, their quiet persistence. Maslach argues that burnout intensifies when “there is a mismatch between the values of the individual and those of the organization.” I reconciled that mismatch by honoring the stories anyway, even when the system lacked language to recognize them.
Maslach’s work has helped me understand that my experience of burnout did not signal disengagement. I did not stop caring. Emotional exhaustion manifested as sustained depletion, not collapse. Depersonalization emerged as selective distance, not indifference. It was a necessary boundary to remain functional. Reduced personal accomplishment reflected mismeasurement rather than futility. Engagement persisted, but it took the form of discipline rather than enthusiasm. As Maslach notes, engagement is not simply the absence of burnout; it is “characterized by energy, involvement, and efficacy." In my case, that energy was quiet, that involvement ethical, that efficacy often invisible.
The opposite of burnout, then, is not optimism or individual self-care alone. It is alignment. It is stewardship. It is the intentional design of conditions so that necessary work does not rely indefinitely on individual endurance. Maslach is explicit on this point: “The responsibility for burnout lies with the organization, not the individual.” That insight has been liberating, not accusatory.
This is why my sense of vocation is shifting now. Over the past year, several mentors who shaped me deeply have died. They were men who appeared at critical moments in my life and taught me how to be both a teacher and a man. Each of them served as an administrator. Their influence was not rooted in authority, but in presence. It was rooted in standing between people and systems, in noticing who was bending too long, in redistributing strain before it became damage.
At this stage of my career, I feel called to honor that legacy. My desire to move into administration is not an escape from teaching, but its extension. It is a movement from mentoring students to mentoring teachers; from being a gleaner in the field to helping reshape the conditions under which others labor there. Like Lhermitte’s figures at the end of the day, I have stayed. Now, I feel both the responsibility and the readiness to step into a role where staying is no longer solitary, and where endurance is no longer mistaken for inexhaustibility.
In that sense, Gleaners, End of Day offers not a conclusion, but an accounting. It is the moment when the light fades enough to reveal what truly remains and to decide, deliberately, what must change before the next day begins.