Last updated on March 5th, 2024 at 03:08 am
It wasn’t the usual formula: I didn’t wait until having kid #2 to make my exit from teaching. (I didn’t even wait until my first child made her appearance!) But I knew it was the right time.
Teaching brings me mixed feelings
The decision to leave the classroom is tough, because it’s wrapped in the complexities of the profession itself. I hold onto all sorts of paradoxes. Our school systems are beautiful and quite utterly broken. Both at the same time. I have days, hours, minutes of the bell-to-bell that uplift my heart and send me quick, warm rays of pure sunshine, and I also experience wobbling dangerously on the edge of breakdown and misery and defeat. All of these feelings can come tumbling out of a single day.
I can hold onto memories of two kinds: the best and the worst. My best classroom memories are memorialized in the thoughtful letters and pictures hand drawn and gifted to me by my students. Photographs and video clips remind me of our times together in the classroom, in fleeting golden moments of discovery and wonder and fun and quiet study.
The worst memories from teaching have their place here, too. They help me decide what to do. The unmatched frustrations of the system’s expectations while being ill equipped to meet them urges me onto intentionally working toward the life I really want. The flashes back to the worst instances of student behavior and parent cruelty and system inadequacies leave their impression, almost driving me to cover up and forget, but keeping on life support a determined feeling to never return myself to it.
Charmaine, Chocolate for the teach
The decision to leave is tough, because it’s wrapped in the complexities of the profession itself.
Deciding to resign from teaching
It was a curiosity that came to me that spring unannounced: What if I quit?
My mind kept tumbling the idea around. I made it through February, then March. April stretched out and only passed, it seemed, with the hope of May. My husband and I took a lot of walks, talking about our goals and the future. Plans for children and a home with more than one bedroom. Hopes for his career and for mine.
Once the possibility– even only a slivering crack of a possibility– was realized, we made our plans. Finances and logistics had to be figured, and schedules reassessed. I was going to quit!
It was on a Zoom meeting with my principal at my end-of-the-year evaluation, with my husband miming his encouragement from behind my laptop screen, that I told my principal my plans not to renew my contract.
The meeting closed out, I snapped my laptop shut, and that was it. We made our plans for a move, to conceive. I had a thousand ideas rushing at me, and just sort of reveled in this final teacher summer.
I was free from the constraints of a complicated career I truly loved, but now I could direct those skills into something else if I chose. I could focus on other, nonwork goals more entirely.
The humility of becoming a lowly substitute after being a classroom teacher
I’d watch August of the next school year roll in with freshly sharpened pencils and unscuffed sneakers and shiny backpacks not missing it too much. We moved, we conceived, I trialed a business idea, I tutored a student part time, I carried my baby, I met her that next June. Another school year would start, and I held my baby, losing track of time.
I immersed myself in this new role, this world as old as time but fresh to me: motherhood. We learned and struggled together. She was my singular pupil, the focus of my efforts, the reason for leaving a profession I both loved and hated.
When my baby reached six months old, I pushed her in her stroller into the HR department at our school board building and finalized the paperwork. I smiled for a new picture as I tried to distract baby from crying and received my employee badge. I’d be a substitute teacher.
A complicated relationship between work and family life
I decided that full-time teaching had outsized demands for me at this point in my life.
Now I had a family and household to care for, not to mention a new baby who needed me constantly. The last thing I wanted was to feel guilty for not responding to a parent email or for skating by with a lackluster holiday party or neglecting grading.
The freedom, I’ll admit, has been totally worth the difficult moments of leaving the profession. But I still miss the paycheck, the benefits, the chats with coworkers, and of course, the wonderful moments with students.
Substitute teaching has been my in-between. And while substitute teaching as a former full-time teacher definitely feels odd, and like a downgrade, it’s the situation that works best for our family right now.
And the fact that I get to be home most days with my baby girl? It makes it all worth it.
Teachers: Would you quit if you had a chance? Would you ever consider substitute teaching? Let me know in the comments!
