Last updated on December 14th, 2023 at 06:53 pm
Right now? In our current state of education and its expectations for teachers?
Teaching isn’t even a single human-friendly job.
Here’s why, my friends:
Misconceptions while picking a profession
I always knew I wanted to be married and have kids, but that enormously important life goal was brushed aside by any career advisors I had the pleasure of working with in early adulthood.
“What are you good at?”
“What do you like doing?”
These are the only questions I was left to ruminate upon before I was whisked through different offices and told to pick a major.
Selecting a career based on future family goals is not currently our collegiate system’s prime method or focus or even consideration.
Even still, as I wrestled through what to pursue, I landed on a career in education as a family-friendly option. This was after I finished my degree in journalism, a profession in which I held plenty of passion and excitement for, but increasingly revealed its cracks in its ability to balance my wishes for family. I saw my colleagues moving to expensive closet-sized apartments in New York City to chase the dream, and I identified that as something I’d very much not like to do.
But being a teacher always seemed to fit with marriage and having children. In fact, I was sure it would help in attracting a husband by showing my dedication to working with kids. Teachers got weekends and holidays and summers “off.” An ideal family schedule!
Could this finally be the well-balanced career I was searching for?
Teaching is not ideal for starting families
My dating life during teaching was almost nonexistent
The extra stress and workload of modern teaching renders it quite the all-encompassing job. It takes over one’s life, especially in that make-it-or-break-it first year.
Of the five years I spent in the classroom, only the last two contained dates (with men! Not calendar dates.) Those first three years, I didn’t date in my spare time. I ate food, slept, exercised occasionally, and mostly wept.
I’ve written a whole post about how teaching is incompatible with finding a spouse— even though somehow through all of the overwhelm associated with teaching third grade in a pandemic year, I was able to meet and marry my husband.
It took a concerted effort on my part to pursue a romantic relationship, and yes– I had to relinquish my teaching job to the back burner, something my go-getter self was uneager to do.
It was one of the best moves I could make in life, by the way.
I said “No way” to pregnancy during teaching
While a ton of teachers work through their pregnancies and take a leave after baby is born, I didn’t want to.
I can think of only a few careers less conducive to pregnancy. But teaching is up there on my no-go list.
Not only is the school day very inflexible (I would need breaks for the bathroom!) but getting sub coverage is a top challenge these days. I wanted to be able to attend appointments without spending hours on lesson plans or making deals with my class for good behavior.
Teaching swamped me with stress. I realize some of that was self-inflicted, but the external pressures mounted in unsustainable ways. I didn’t want my child to grow in that environment.
And so I quit. Perhaps one of my life’s second greatest move.
You only get one life. It’s actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.
Jojo Moyes, “Me Before You”
Teaching is not a great profession for raising families
Is an educator role suited to having a newborn baby?
Another reason I wasn’t tempted to go back to full-time teaching was because it seemed incompatible with the needs of caring for a newborn. Even if I returned when baby reached three months, (a typical maternity leave?) I still planned to breastfeed, and this can be super hard in teaching.
The schedule of a teacher is pretty rigid, and we know how easily lunch times or planning periods can get sucked away just dealing with meetings and conferences, which is not even to mention those unplanned situations like behavior issues or parent communication.
Would I really want to leave my precious pumping time– literally needed to feed my child– up to chance like this?
Which begs another question: Would I be happy or even remotely prepared to run a classroom while using my planning and/or lunch period for pumping?
I did return as a substitute teacher when my daughter turned six months. Pumping as a sub is no joke, either, but at least I my free times never got infringed upon and I could pump in relative peace (a story for another time, perhaps). Plus, I subbed just here and there– nothing like the demands of teaching day in and day out for a whole year.
Can these demands be balanced with caring for a baby? Not well, I’d wager.
A teacher’s heavy workload makes it hard to have a life
I’m not going to dance around it– the overbearing workload of classroom teachers is suffocating. It squeezes out the possibilities of having much of a life outside the school walls, much less being an active and present family member.
Teachers in a recent RAND study reported working an average of 15 hours over contract time per week. Sounds about right to me. And that doesn’t include possible second jobs just to fill in the gaps of a lackluster teacher paycheck.
The study reported that teacher work weeks racked up to 56 hours, compared to the national average of 46.
Did I really want this to be my life while trying to raise children?
Once I learned the reality of the expectations and load currently placed on teachers, I couldn’t help but dream of ways to wriggle free.
Over my years of teaching, I developed ways to speed things up, to systematize and increase efficiency so that my after-hours work finally whittled down into something resembling a healthy human schedule. By my last year of teaching, Saturdays spent beeping myself into the empty school building or huddling up on the sofa grading assignments lessened more and more until they were relatively rare occurences.
There are ways to reduce working extraneous hours. It took frontloading the bulk of my work at the beginning of the year and heaps of finesse planning out the particulars– but I still chose to call it quits.
I still felt the job seeping into too much of my personal life. And though I had great classroom memories, and felt that I was doing impactful and important work, I left to focus on my family life and never really looked back.
What life after teaching can look like
If you’re at the point of choosing a career path, I hope this honest account was helpful. It’s solely my opinion, but I think it’s worth putting more teacher and former teachers’ opinions out there, so people can see what it’s really like (hint: our school systems have changed a whole heap since you and I were students!)
If family (or a future family) is important to you, let me give you wholesale permission to absolutely include it in your decision making. No one else will advocate for your family but you.
Other careers seem much more accommodating to family life– like any job that can be respectably scaled down into part-time. I have a few nurse mama friends that seem to be enjoying working 1-3 days a week while staying at home the rest.
With teaching, the only part-time option is substituting. And that can be degrading and not enticing pay wise. (Though the challenges of subbing are numerous, it’s still worth it for me right now!)
And if you’re currently caught between teaching and family life, please know that I am so impressed by you! It seems nearly impossible not only because of the physical, extraneous working hours but also the mental and emotional load. So much is put on our modern teachers.
If you’re interested in reading more about my leaving teaching journey, I wrote a few more personal posts as well as how-to guides for the specifics of calling it quits. Whatever you choose, I wish you clarity and wisdom in that decision.
I know it was one of my favorite decisions to date.
