- I chose to be a teacher to connect with and help children — the job wasn’t what I expected.
- As a teacher I valued student relationships, but job evaluations focused on other metrics.
- After six years, I quit. Here’s what I wish I had known before I chose this career.
I had a lot of good reasons behind deciding to become a teacher, which included job security and setting a good example for my son. But after six years of teaching junior high and high school English, I’m leaving the profession for good. It’s not because I think I’m a bad teacher, but because it has taken me some time to accept that teaching just isn’t right for me.
Here’s what I wish I had known before choosing this career.
The part of teaching that mattered most to me was not valued
What I found most rewarding about teaching was building relationships with students, particularly the difficult ones that other people had given up on. I became a teacher to connect with those kids, because I had been one of them.
My personal barometer for success was when I realized that those difficult students were suddenly giving me a hug or coming by between classes just to see me. I knew I had gotten through to them and could help them build their confidence and see their own value in the world.
The problem with me viewing that as success was that it was not what mattered most to my supervisors. As a teacher, I was evaluated on skills like classroom management, curriculum pacing, and testing scores. While I always put the impact I knew I was making with my students’ self-worth first, that was not what my job performance was evaluated on.
Teaching proved to have a poor return on investment
A few years in, I began to realize that a large part of what kept me hanging on to teaching was the sunk-cost fallacy. I had spent so much time becoming a teacher and learning how to be a good one, and I didn’t want that effort to have been for nothing.
Even though teaching was taking from me more than what it was giving back, I didn’t want to give up on it because of how much I had spent becoming one.
You shouldn’t plan your life around your job
Not only had I spent so much of my past on teaching, but many of my future plans depended on being a teacher, too.
When my son finally makes it to middle school, I wanted to have the privilege of teaching at his school so that I could keep a watchful eye on him. Middle school is a pivotal time for a young person, and I wanted to be able to steer him in the right direction if I saw him veering down the wrong path.
When I left the profession, I was only one school year away from getting to teach at the same school that my son.
The breaks were nice on paper, but I was too burnt out to enjoy them
A major part of why I became a teacher was because I wanted to have the same schedule as my son. I also didn’t want to have the added expense and stress of having to find childcare during school breaks.
I liked the idea of having secured time off throughout the year that I wouldn’t even have to ask for. The problem became that I was so burnt out from a day of teaching, I felt like I could barely show up for my family at home most days. And when those breaks finally did arrive, all I wanted to do was rest, not travel.
The job made me sick — literally
Ever since my first day of teaching six years ago, I’ve dealt with health issues that I believe were caused by the stress that comes with teaching middle school.
The healthiest I’ve felt during the last six years was when we had to shut down for six months due to the pandemic. Initially, I thought I would adjust to teaching, thinking that the job would become easier in time and that I would find ways to better manage the stress. But after throwing out my back one too many times, I came to accept that the job was literally breaking my back. I felt that my body was begging me to take care of myself and make some changes.
I’m excited for my future
While my next career move is uncertain, my health is already improving.
I had always wanted a job where I could help others, and I knew I was doing that with my students. But the worse I felt teaching, the more I realized that I couldn’t even help myself anymore.
Someone asked me what I would tell my son if he were in my situation, and the answer was obvious. I would have told him to quit. While it was extremely rewarding to help my students, I finally saw that I wasn’t showing up for my family in the way I wanted to because the job was taking everything I had to give, including my own well-being.
It wasn’t easy walking away from what I thought was going to be my life’s career, but my body is already thanking me for it. No matter how scary it is that I have to start over again career-wise, I know I’ve made the right decision.
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