- Kelly Andrews-Denney is a 44-year-old mother near Portland, Oregon.
- She taught high school math for 17 years and loved her job until 2020.
- In 2024, she started working at Costco, and her husband says she looks “lighter” coming home.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kelly Andrews-Denney. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I started working as a high school math teacher in 2007. It was an urban school in Portland with a lot of lower-income kids, and I absolutely loved it.
Those early years weren’t without hard times. The day before I started, a student in the school died by suicide. In the first seven years I worked there, we lost at least one student every year, and several of them were suicides.
It wasn’t easy, but I felt resilient. I could cope with the emotions, and I managed the heavy workload. Eventually, it was too much and I decided to leave my job at the school and go work at Costco instead.
Things changed when I became a mom
When I started having my own kids in 2013, that began changing. I noticed how much the job took out of me, but I still loved it and looked forward to work each day.
I remember always thinking that if a teacher doesn’t want to teach, they shouldn’t — it does too much damage to the students. However, I still wanted to teach.
But in 2020, when the pandemic hit, my love for teaching dwindled.
I taught my students over a screen. Kids rarely put their video on, so my lessons were taught to a blank screen. It was difficult to maintain enthusiasm for this kind of teaching.
In the spring of 2020, a few months after we went online, I started getting migraines. I felt really dizzy and couldn’t walk normally. My doctor did a lot of testing but couldn’t find anything wrong and said the headaches were vestibular migraines. At first, they didn’t happen often, but when they did, I’d be out of action for up to four days.
The following spring, in 2021, a student I used to teach, who I’d kept up with after he graduated, was shot and killed. The impact that had on me was immense.
My physical issues would go away over the summer break
Around this time, I started taking an antidepressant — both to help with my depression and also to manage the migraines. I also started using an herbal supplement any time I felt a headache coming on. Both of these seemed to help the migraines but didn’t make them go away.
Once summer break started, I didn’t get any headaches.
When we all got back in the classroom during the 2021/2022 school year, there was a lot of adjusting. The kids were different. They were unsocialized. Many of them didn’t have access to resources during the year we were online. A lot of them were taking care of family members. And loads of them were traumatized and scared.
But teachers were traumatized, too. We were instructed to focus on the social and emotional well-being of the kids as if we were trained counselors. But we weren’t trained to do that job, and many of us needed help ourselves after the pandemic.
That first year back, I didn’t have many behavioral issues in the class — just kids with low energy levels, fear about getting COVID-19, and poor socialization.
But the next school year — the 2022/2023 school year — I had a class of ninth graders with the most challenging behavioral problems I’d ever had in a class. This class hadn’t been in a normal classroom for an entire school year since the fifth grade.
Prior to this, I’d been given difficult classes on purpose. The administration knew I could handle them, but I couldn’t deal with this class.
I resigned in 2024
I remember coming home without one ounce of emotional or physical energy for my own children.
I decided to go part-time for the 2023/2024 school year. Even though this relieved some pressure, I had checked out. I wasn’t enjoying work, and I knew I couldn’t carry on teaching if I didn’t love it. It wasn’t fair to the kids.
I resigned, committing to work until September 30th, 2024.
My plan was to substitute teach while I looked for another job with a comparable salary, but I couldn’t find anything.
I decided to apply at Costco and got a job stocking shelves on the early shift, starting around 4 a.m. Initially, I questioned my decision as I was taking a huge pay cut. My hourly pay was a third of what I was making as a teacher.
Equally, I was looking forward to working a job and then leaving it at work — not taking anything home with me.
I started in October. It’s been so much less stressful than working as a teacher. My physical body is exhausted after every shift — it’s a lot of manual labor — but I feel total relief in not having to make a thousand decisions each day, not being responsible for the academic and emotional well-being of up to 180 teens, and not carrying their trauma home with me.
After one recent shift, my husband told me I looked different. He said I looked lighter. I agree, I feel it.
I may return to teaching one day once I have had a chance to heal, but not for now.
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