Why I Quit Teaching 🙅

I’m sure lots of people have cried on the NYC subway, but I never thought I’d be one of them.

I don’t think there was a particular, specific reason it happened… But I can clearly remember sitting there, trying to hold back tears and just utterly failing. I knew it was bad when the woman next to me put her hand on me and said, “it’s going to be okay.” (Thank you, kind New Yorker!)

I was that girl: in tears, in public, for no apparent reason 🙈

Looking back on that moment years later, it is obvious why: being a NYC Public School teacher brings you to your mental and physical health limits.

I thought it would get better by going to teach at a private school, and in some ways it did… But when I finally was out of the profession, it became abundantly clear that the teaching profession as a whole is asking too much of our teachers. 

How the education system is overtaxing its teachers: 

1. The system is too big & out of touch 😅

Firstly, the system itself is bloated and flawed: big classes with one teacher trying to force kids to “sit down” and “learn” content that often doesn’t feel relevant to the kids. Columbia University Teachers College and other graduate programs are trying to help update the system by teaching educators to switch to concepts like “project based learning” and “student-centered learning,” but those concepts cannot be implemented in the behemoth of a system teachers are put into.

Teachers are left impossibly high expectations for themselves while the reality on the ground is that teachers have too many students, and most of the kids are barely reading and barely interested. Everything can feel like a struggle with the kids because the kids are not buying into this model and the individual kids don’t feel seen and heard. Most of the content doesn’t feel relevant to the modern world and the kids know it!

Because I had so many students, I didn’t get to know them as well as I would have liked.

I did get a taste of a better way: at the private school I taught at, my first year I had a class of 9 students. It was absolutely lovely. We sat around a conference table and felt like a learning family. Today, I work one-on-one with students as a tutor and it feels like a much more effective learning (and working!) environment. Ancient models of learning are actually tutor-based/small groups so the current education system needs to reconsider its format.

2. Toxic relationship between teachers & parents ⚔️

Something happened in the past few decades that led to a tarnished relationship between parents and teachers. I cannot tell you how often at both the public and private schools I worked at, teachers felt “attacked” by parents, often via long, ranting emails sent at 1am. It is devastating for a teacher, who is just trying to hold their head above water, to open their inbox in the morning and have to read a message sent in anger.

We adults have to stand together and treat each other with respect and decency. Angry emails are pretty much never okay: talking things out in person, building relationships, connecting to other humans as humans (and respecting other adults as adults). I found that this toxic relationship between parents and teachers spread throughout the school administration and policies and created a really nasty paranoia amongst all the adults in the school. This of course, translates to the students, who feel the toxicity and definitely pick up on the fact that the adults are not all acting as a team. 

This paranoid, toxic environment takes a huge toll on teachers' physical and mental health. The pressure that you are being watched and judged for me sucked a lot of the joy out of what should be a really positive, freeing space (the classroom). So many teachers are constantly getting sick from the stress. You barely have time during the school day to work on your lessons or build relationships with the kids, so you take piles of grading home, and are constantly wondering if you did enough/said enough/are good enough. The residue of the stress from the day pretty much doesn’t leave your body so your sleep is atrocious and you have to wake up really early so you have enough time to prep before the kids come in. This all just leads to a general lack of joy in education spaces. 

When I was in it, I just thought it was normal: work is supposed to be challenging and you’re supposed to be “judged” in your job. But it does not benefit the kids who are in front of you if you yourself are secretly an anxious mess. I think I held it together really well, but once I was out of it, I could tell my body had been repressing a lot. 

3. Grades suck 🔠

Another big reason I left teaching was the concept (and paperwork required) of grading & “assessing” kids. I don’t really have a better solution right now to this, but I just know, for me, I hated assigning kids a “number” and feeling like all the kids and parents cared about was the grade. By the end of my time in schools, grades were so inflated because teachers were getting so much pushback from parents and students. The grades were becoming meaningless but teachers were still buried in the paperwork.

Many schools are switching to “standards-based grading” or other forms, but these end up being totally onerous and hard to implement, therefore still stress inducing for the kids and teachers.

4. No TIME ⏰

Finally, I left teaching because I just wanted TIME. I wanted to sleep as much as I needed so that I could regulate my emotions successfully and feel my best every day.  I wanted time to play violin and plan fun events with my friends. As a teacher, I felt that I had no time, and even with the great vacations we got, I was still stressed or worried about all the grading and work I had to do. My mind was not free during what free time I did have. 

A possible solution would be that schools (and society!) implement the 4-Day Work Week, but the demands on teachers would have to lessen as well so that days off aren’t riddled with more grading and anxiety. 

Conclusions:

What kids really need are small learning environments, with happy, passionate teachers who have slept well, and who know the students and families well. What teachers really need is time, smaller class sizes, and respect. I hope this is happening somewhere in the current education system, but that was not my experience! 

This is why ultimately I have embraced tutoring! Not only do students immensely benefit from one-to-one intentional time with an adult, but the flexibility of scheduling allows for the tutor, families, and students to create the education model that works for them.

I will be writing more in the future about how I think tutoring is the future of education, but that’s all for now!