Things were not going to improve significantly and I was going to go home exhausted every day because the school culture was so toxic.Īnd yet the guilt I felt over even thinking about quitting was indescribable. I realized that I was up against too many obstacles, and most of them were insurmountable. I hit a breaking point where I realized my job was not worth the energy expenditure I had to put out every day. And so I was still spending the entire day disciplining students and teaching them basic work habits and socio-emotional skills, alone and without support in a chaotic, unsafe school where neither their needs nor mine were being met. I wanted to see them develop a sense of curiosity and wonder about the world through investigations in science.īut by the second quarter of the school year, the kids still weren’t anywhere near ready for those things. I wanted to delve into books with them and watch their eyes light up when they made connections between the text and their own lives. I wanted to have deep conversations with my students about current events. I was managing the classroom, I was maintaining some sense of order, but I wasn’t teaching. We practiced the same basic routines and procedures over and over, and three-quarters of the class just wasn’t internalizing anything.
Getting students to respond appropriately to even the smallest request took Herculean, first-day-of-school efforts from me. Things were quite a bit calmer in my classroom, but student behavior still posed a huge problem. Not exactly a fun working and learning environment. An off-duty police officer and a drill sergeant were hired to help control the students in the cafeteria: one of them would bend over and scream in the children’s faces while the other marched up and down the center aisle, yelling into a microphone as the kids threw food around his head. One of my kids found a knife on the ground on our way to lunch. We couldn’t send students to the bathroom alone, as there had been instances of both girls and boys being raped there by other students. We had no windows in our classroom and were not allowed to have recess or any break at all during the day (per district mandate), so I was stuck in a tiny, dark classroom with a large class of energetic seven-year-olds and zero outlet for all their energy.īeyond our four walls, the school’s atmosphere was in total chaos. I was disappointed to learn that most of my second graders were reading on a late kindergarten level, and the pressure to get them up to speed was weighing heavily on me. I had just moved to the state and had no idea what to expect in my new school. But what people didn’t know was that it took EVERYTHING out of me to keep it that way. The kids liked me, their parents liked me. My students were learning, and their benchmark test scores showed strong gains. My administrators were blindsided by the decision–after all, I was an experienced teacher with multiple years in urban schools, and I had a good handle on my classroom. It was just over 10 years ago that I quit my teaching job mid-year, during my sixth year of teaching, and it was one of the hardest decisions I ever made. Why I quit my teaching job in the middle of the school year You see, I’ve quit teaching twice: once because the school environment was so toxic that I hated my job, and once because I wanted to shift into a different role in education. I’ll share both of those stories today with you and share five things I learned that might be helpful to you, if you’re thinking about quitting for either reason. You want to make a greater impact for kids, or you want a more flexible schedule, or just feel like there’s something more out there for you.
Others of you still love teaching, but you’re feeling an itch to do something different.
You want to quit more than anything but have no idea what the alternative would be. The idea of going back to That Place just makes you sick to your stomach. Some of you right now are barely making it through this year, and are so dreading the return to school the following morning that you can’t even enjoy your evenings.