Why I Quit Teaching—For Now

It was never about being done; it was about being done for now

During my second year of teaching, the pandemic struck. I was just coming into my own as a teacher when life as we knew it was uprooted. That year, I finished teaching my seventh graders virtually while my son finished his kindergarten year from a distance. Before the pandemic, I couldn’t have imagined doing anything else but teaching for the rest of my life. But my son, who was only five and had virus-induced asthma, was at high risk for Covid complications, and the state of Florida had very little in the way of safety practices set up for our return in the Fall that year. 

I made the difficult decision to put my career on hold in order to homeschool my son temporarily. While I had teaching experience, I had never taught my own son, and the process was enlightening. My professional perspective of a child’s resistance to learning was getting all mixed up with my parental sympathy for my own child hating his school work, especially when it was being facilitated via a computer and his mother. I had always thought of my own students in a parental way, but homeschooling my son brought those feelings into a different light. I saw more than ever that every student is different, and it’s difficult to see clearly what’s going on below the surface of learning. 

For income, I had to embrace virtual tutoring quickly. When it came to being a teacher online, I suddenly had to learn how to teach in an entirely new way. It was difficult enough to win my students’ engagement and participation when I taught in person. With a computer in between us, I had to find different ways to encourage them to buy in. While homeschooling left me with my teacher and parent emotions all muddled up, virtual tutoring made me a stronger teacher. I got better at facilitating engaging discussions, finding stories that my students were genuinely interested in, and thinking on my feet when it came to navigating technical difficulties. Plus, having to see your own mirrored image all day is a surefire way to beat all your insecurities into the ground. 

A lot happened throughout my pandemic leave, which ended up being three school-years long—two of which I homeschooled my son. For my third year out of the classroom, I wanted to be home and available while my son readjusted to being back in school for in-person learning again. During this time, I found my husband, got married, and we moved in with him. I also finally found the time to write, so I finished my first book and started freelancing. Plus, I got to see the perks of remote work, such as being home with my pets all day, it being easier to fit in workouts, and the quality of my meals improving because of having easy access to my own kitchen. But something less positive and much more disruptive happened, too. I got really sick. 

When my symptoms started, I thought I was just exhausted from the stress of the pandemic and all the changes to my life that came with it. But things got worse and worse, including abnormal levels of fatigue, near-constant upset stomach and migraines, and chronic pain throughout my body. It took several years, several hospital visits, and several different doctors to figure out that what I was most likely experiencing was long Covid, which I had probably gotten right before the lockdown. During my third year out of the classroom, when my son was back in school but I was still home, I was frustrated with being sick all the time and tired of waiting for things to improve. I decided to go back into the classroom though I still didn’t feel like myself: I was probably never going to get better anyway, so why not just get back to doing what I had once loved? I thought teaching again might actually help me feel better.  

My last taste of teaching had been pre-pandemic, and I had only heard about pandemic teaching from afar. Although it seems like we’re not allowed to harp on it, the pandemic changed everything. Teaching was hard enough, but between the interruption in education and the toll it took on mental health, kids’ behaviors have become unbearable. After my first day back in the classroom, I came home and cried on and off all night because I could not for the life of me get these kids to put away their phones. I had gotten a job at the high school of my choice and thought it would be so much better than teaching junior high, but these tenth graders were worse-behaved than the seventh graders I’d had pre-pandemic. 

I knew pretty quickly that I’d made a mistake in returning to in-person teaching, because every school day that passed, I felt more and more sure that I wasn’t going to get better if I stayed in the classroom. The stress of the job and the students’ behavior was making all of my pre-existing conditions worse, primarily the migraines and chronic pain. Then I started having new symptoms, like heart palpitations, ringing in my ears, and feeling like I might faint in front of my students. I had one class in particular that was putting me in an early grave. There were thirty students, which is far too many for one teacher in one small room, and while they were all performing below their grade-level in English Language Arts state testing, they were also blatantly disregarding general school rules. I had students walking out of the classroom without asking, listening to their music during class discussions so loudly that we could all hear it, throwing their snacks to each other from across the room, and flat-out ignoring me when I gave them directions. I started teaching because I actually care about making a positive impact. This class was breaking me. 

After only a few months, I was worse off than when I had decided to go back to work. I have always prided myself on putting my son before work, and for the first time I felt that work was getting the little I had left to give. I would come home from work totally drained and have nothing left for my family, let alone myself. After careful deliberation, I felt that I owed it to my son and husband to get better. I can’t even count how many times I’ve been bedridden without the capacity to show up for my family in the simplest ways. The day I gave my two weeks notice, I wrote myself a letter for the time I knew might come down the road: the day I considered returning to the classroom. Part of my letter: “You care, so everything matters to you. When you teach, there is little to no room for anything else in your life. You are SPENT after work and even on weekends. Remember getting sick on Sunday nights? That is a literal sign from your body that this job is a taker, not a giver. What’s given is all you’ve got to those kids, and while that can be its own reward, what about you? What about your family?”

Even now that I’m out of the classroom, focusing on my health, my family, and my writing, it’s still true: I haven’t taken teaching off the table. As my husband is also a teacher, this is a subject we’ve discussed many, many times. Aside from the stress and inadequate pay for what we do, could either of us really imagine doing anything else? What kind of job could we have that earns as much money, offers the same health insurance and retirement benefits, and gives us Thanksgiving week, two weeks at Christmas, a week off in the Spring, and two months off during the Summer, without having to put in vacation requests for it and feeling guilty for doing so? 

The time off was a large part of why I wanted to become a teacher, so that I could be with my son at the same times that he had off from school. I’ve heard about teachers who leave, take full-time positions outside of education, and claim that the dramatically lowered amount of stress makes up for them having to work all year long. Maybe that proved to be true for them, but for me, I don’t buy it. I imagine working at the library all year again, which I had done before teaching and loved. I liked having the time to plan for programs and the feeling that I had brought joy to the patrons who visited us. Plus, being around all the books, peace, and quiet was serene and filled me with contentment. But I knew my son was home from school during breaks without me around to enjoy it with him, and even with all the good, that killed me.  

When it comes to teaching, it’s obviously not the stress that I miss—and like most teachers, it certainly isn’t the pay that brought me to the profession. It’s not even the summers off, as nice as they are. It’s the desire to help young people and knowing I’m good at that impossible job—the times when I saw I was making an imprint on at least some of these kids’ lives. 

But no matter how many rose-colored memories I have of teaching or how tantalizing the steady summer paycheck may be, the only thing I know for sure is that I won’t be returning until I’ve made a full recovery. The decision to leave was never about being done with teaching. It was just about being done for now, because I knew I wouldn’t get better without taking a break. 

It wasn’t easy stepping away. Before my last day with those students, I wrote myself another letter, reminding myself of why I had to let go. I told myself, “I know it’s scary to step away, but in your heart, you already know that’s what you need to do. You are not a failure for leaving teaching. If anything, you are stronger for doing it in order to pursue vital health. To be a good person, you must feel good first, and you deserve to heal. You have been through so much and made it out on the other side. Loving yourself enough to get better? You should know that you can do that.”