Are You Thinking About Leaving Teaching? Let’s Talk.

“I just can’t do it anymore.” “This year/course/group of students broke me.”

We’ve seen and heard so many comments like these from teachers in the last few years, even the last few weeks.

And we get it. In 2022, these were our comments.

When we left the classroom post-pandemic, leaving teaching was a hot topic—it seemed like everyone was talking about teacher shortages amidst larger conversations about the Great Resignation.

Those conversations have died down, but the problems remain, and many teachers are suffering, even contemplating leaving teaching, in isolation. Teacher burnout is a serious concern in a job with more demands than it is humanly possible to fulfill.

As we talk to teachers around the country, it’s clear that not only have the problems that drove us out of the classroom gone unaddressed, but in many ways, things have gotten worse. Pandemic learning loss, AI use, growing student apathy and disrespect, and a political climate in which curriculum challenges are all-too-common have all made teaching, an already difficult job, even harder.

It breaks our hearts—for students and for teachers. Leaving teaching is a difficult decision. Most of us selected this career out of a passion for our subject and a desire to make a meaningful difference in teenagers’ lives. Leaving teaching means, in many cases, giving up a part of our identity, and it removes excellent, dedicated teachers from the classroom, an incredible loss to students.

But in some cases, leaving teaching is necessary. It was the right decision for us, and we want to share some advice for those of you trying to determine whether leaving teaching is the right decision for you.

Why Leaving Teaching Was Right for Us

We left the classroom at the end of February 2022, a decision we discussed in Episode 12 of our podcast, Answers May Vary.

In part, our decision was motivated by personal health issues: Kate underwent cancer treatment in 2017, and Steph was diagnosed with OCD in 2021. Naturally, both experiences led to seasons of massive re-evaluation. While we won’t dig into those here, we’d love to talk to you more if it would be helpful in your own decision-making process.

Ultimately, there were five key factors in our decision to leave.

We’re both perfectionists. Yes, we hold our students to high standards, but we also hold ourselves to high standards. We want everything we do to be the best it can be, and when we don’t get the results we want, we go back and rework until we do.

This, however, requires an amount of work that we could no longer sustain while being healthy human beings with strong family and friend relationships. We didn’t see a way to scale back what we were doing any further without sacrificing the quality of our work in a way that was unacceptable to us.

This is not to say that it’s impossible to do this job in a healthy way. It is, we’ve done a lot of reflecting about things we would have done differently, and our goal as a company is to help other teachers avoid coming to this point. But we didn’t see that then, and in many ways, the damage had already been done.

By the time we left the classroom, it was abundantly clear that our values as teachers no longer aligned with the values of our administration and many of our colleagues.

For years, we had been working to adjust our expectations and provide support to our students—switching from teaching AP Literature to teaching 9th grade honors, offering after-school workshops for struggling writers, moving toward a (mostly) homework-free classroom—and yet it seemed like we still weren’t making our administrators happy.

By the time we left, it felt like it no matter how much we attempted to reflect, change, and give, it still came down to us on one side of the table and administrators, counselors, parents, and students on the other. This is a demoralizing situation to be in, and one that can’t go on indefinitely.

Kate has always said that teaching is a job in which the highs are really high and the lows are really low, so you work for the highs. For many years, the highs—the student who writes a meaningful thank you note when they get into college, the student who earns their first A after months of tutoring—compensated for the lows. But by the time we left, we’d experienced several years of increasingly low lows and very few highs.

The pandemic was difficult on everyone. We taught from home for thirteen months, and when we left the classroom, we were still wearing masks and COVID testing once a week.

But the final straw for us was realizing that, particularly in our district, the pandemic hadn’t caused new problems so much as exposed problems that had existed for years, and it was going to be many more years before the “low lows” we were experiencing came to an end.

We didn’t want to leave because of the pandemic—it was a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe that required the entire world to adapt.

Not only had we made the compromises we felt comfortable making as professionals, but we’d also taken steps to address the growing burnout we were experiencing.

Kate was working part-time and had changed the courses she was teaching. Steph had given up teaching yearbook, started therapy, and made as many lifestyle changes as she possibly could.

We were at a loss as to what else we could do to alleviate the situation, and it was clear that we could not have the life balance we needed and do the job the way we wanted to do it.

What Have We Realized Since Leaving Teaching?

About a year after we left the classroom, we recorded a follow-up podcast episode reflecting on our decision (spoiler alert: we thought it was the right decision then, and an additional two years later, we still do!).

As we’ve had time to recover and reflect, we’ve had the opportunity to get a much larger perspective on education and the teaching profession, and there are a couple things that might be helpful to know if you find yourself contemplating whether or not leaving teaching is the right decision for you.

We didn’t realize just how little most people know about what it’s like to be a classroom teacher. Since starting a curriculum business, we’ve been amazed by the number of people who have wondered why such a business is needed: after all, don’t schools provide curriculum? And who is our customer—districts? People are shocked to learn that individual teachers are buying resources out of their own pockets to be able to do their job—something we had come to see as normal.

And in broader public conversations, teachers are often seen as the sole decision-makers within the field. Those who aren’t in the field of education don’t realize how many complex factors affect any educational decision and how much teachers’ individual classroom decisions are reactions to a variety of pressures, often made in desperation.

Post-pandemic, education is changing. There are a growing number of hybrid and online schools, companies that offer specialized classes to homeschool students, tutoring and test prep centers, and even families looking to hire private tutors. Many of these alternate forms of education are open to part-time and remote teachers, and the case loads are dramatically smaller than those many of us are used to, leaving us with more time to actually engage with students and differentiate instruction—to do the job as we know it works best.

As we’ve interacted with other teachers, we’ve realized that we were working in a particularly toxic school culture. There are amazing teachers out there who are doing their absolute best to help students learn, and not all faculties are as unhealthy as ours was. Online teacher communities are full of generous teachers with creative ideas who are eager to collaborate.

That being said, we were also lucky in so many ways. We’ve learned that many teachers struggle with even less supportive administrators than we had, mind-boggling classroom management issues, book bans, and small schools where teachers are regularly assigned to 5–6 different courses within a single school year.

As much as we tried to be reflective, it’s hard to truly take time to reflect when you’re in the trenches.

With a broader perspective, we’ve realized that there are so many things we could have done differently. If we returned to the classroom, we’d handle discipline, phones, AI use, and professional relationships differently. We’d be even more practical than we already were in preparing our non-AP-Lit-students for life after high school. We’d slow down and prioritize quality over quantity (even more so than we already had). We’d leverage relationships with parents better.

More than anything else, we’ve realized that the only people pushing us to work so hard were (spoiler alert) the two of us. We could have eased up on so much without doing damage to our students. We could have curated great content from a wide array of teachers rather than insisting on doing everything ourselves. We could have decided to focus on what really mattered and outsourced the rest. We’re proud of the work we did, but there are far more sustainable ways to do this job.

There are systemic issues within education that cannot be solved at the individual teacher level (or even at the school or district level). 

Most relevant to this discussion, the teacher job description needs to look different. It’s currently three full-time jobs—creating materials, delivering instruction, and grading the work. In no other job would this be expected or acceptable, and teachers need to have less on their plates.

Even more, teachers deserve the ability to take an occasional sabbatical, stepping away for a year to decompress and regain a healthier perspective on our profession and our students.

There are countless other large-scale changes that need to be made, and we can’t keep slapping band-aids on a deeply broken system.

How to Know If Leaving Teaching Is Right for You

Leaving teaching is not a decision that’s made lightly, and it’s not necessarily a cure-all. In a particularly tough year, it can be hard to tell whether the burnout you’re experiencing is the result of temporary circumstances, your unique school site, or truly how you feel about the teaching profession.

These are the signs that told us we weren’t just having a bad year, but that it was time to step away.

Our summers felt shorter and shorter, and instead of returning each year with renewed energy, creativity, and enthusiasm, we felt like we were returning to the same old problems without having recovered from the year before.

On the surface, our individual decisions to leave couldn’t have looked more different. Kate had been considering leaving for five years, and Steph seemed to make the decision overnight. But when Steph looked back, she could see how her own journey over the last five years had been leading to that point.

We’ve all had a bad day, week, even a bad year. But when you realize that it’s been years since you had anything good to say about your job, it may be time to make a change.

For much of our careers, we were (to varying degrees) involved with the school community. We attended school events when our students invited us, we joined committees, we advised clubs, we went above and beyond to host after-school tutoring and workshops whenever our students needed it.

But over a series of years, we found ourselves wanting to have less and less to do with the larger school community, avoiding relationships with other teachers, excursions outside of our own classrooms, and any interactions with students that weren’t directly related to our own classes.

While boundaries are absolutely important (and we certainly needed some better ones), we recognized that this attitude wasn’t healthy for us.

This threshold is different for everyone, but when you’re giving 100% (or, as recovering perfectionists, let’s even say 80%) of your time, energy, effort, and mental capacity and not getting enough in return to make the sacrifice worth it, the profession becomes unsustainable.

One assignment or even one unit that doesn’t go well is normal: we’ve all had one of those, and it just means you need revision. But when it feels like everything you do—in the classroom and in the larger school community—is falling flat at best if not utterly failing, it might be time to consider whether it’s time to step away.

For Kate, this was family-oriented: she noticed that her anger and frustration from school were spilling onto her husband and her son in ways they didn’t deserve.

For Steph, it was more about her students and just a general attitude. Students irritated her more often than not, and she couldn’t remember the last time she had anything good to say about work. (It’s been helpful since to realize the difference between normal stress and unhealthy stress—Steph has, perhaps, more on her plate than ever and it’s not easy, but when people ask how work is, she has things she’s excited to share.)

Whether it’s the job itself or what you’re doing outside of work, when it feels like you’ve tried everything and it’s still not getting better, it may be a sign that it’s time to leave.

This was the biggest sign for Steph that it was time to go. Leaving teaching feels terrifying in many ways—you’re giving up a steady paycheck, a retirement plan, tenure, and health insurance. (And we’ll acknowledge right now that those are very real considerations you have to take into account, even if it just means hanging in there for another year or two to make sure you qualify for retirement benefits.)

For quite a few years, Kate had been talking about leaving, and the thought terrified Steph. She couldn’t imagine herself doing anything else, and so, what? She was just supposed to do this job without her other half?

But all of a sudden, it got to a point where, as Kate explained to a curious colleague, Steph would rather make $0 than work at the school any longer.

When you’re so exhausted and frustrated and burned out that you’re willing to forgo the financial security that teaching offers in favor of starting over somewhere new, that’s a big sign that leaving teaching may be the right choice.

For over a year, Steph attended OCD group therapy. One of the therapists had OCD while the other did not. We all used to joke that the therapist who didn’t have OCD was our barometer for what a “normal person” would do: sometimes we’d ask, “What would you do in this situation? Would you worry about this? How many times would you check this?”

It can be helpful to do the same thing with teaching. Teaching is not like other professions, and there are things that the world expects of teachers and that we expect of ourselves that would never be acceptable in another profession.

Imagine you worked in a corporate setting and were experiencing the same frustrations. Would you hesitate to put in your two weeks notice?

This was particularly helpful to Steph as we made our decision to leave before the school year ended. In education, leaving mid-school year is seen as the ultimate “How could you,” a selfish move that damages students’ lives.

And yet, we realized that if we’d gone out on maternity or sick leave, no one would have thought twice. If, like a former colleague of ours, a spouse had gotten a job in another state and we’d had to move, no one would have batted an eye. And, more importantly, if we worked in any other profession and our job had become this damaging to our mental and physical health, no one would have insisted that we stay for months more.

Whether you’re deciding whether or not to leave mid-year or at the end of a year, it helps to ask yourself what you would tell a friend feeling this way about any other job.

Some Friendly Advice

If you do decide to leave, know that it’s not an immediate fix. It took Kate an entire year to decompress from the stress she was feeling before she felt a sense of relief. Steph had to jump immediately into working again to support herself, so she’s probably still decompressing to some extent.

You may experience unexpected grief. No matter how burned out and unhappy you are, teaching is likely part of your identity. Very few of us become teachers for a year or two—it’s something we see as a lifelong career. Kate has shared that she was an “unwilling” teacher, but Steph used to line up her stuffed animals for lessons—leaving teaching meant leaving dreams and an imagined future behind. Your work relationships will change, no matter how close they were, and there’s grief involved in that, too.

It may take you a while to figure out what you want to do instead. As planners, it was hard for both of us (and probably especially for Steph) to have no idea what the plan was.  When you’re teaching, you have an idea of what the rest of your working life will look like. Sure, your classes might change, but school has its expected rhythms. You can look up your salary schedule and know, more or less, what your salary will be until the day you retire.

But since leaving the classroom, our ideas for our business have changed. Steph has gone through multiple job changes. Kate has taken on all kinds of projects at her son’s school and in her extended family that she would have never imagined herself doing. And the future has many more question marks in it than it did when we were in the classroom.

So give yourself time and grace. If leaving teaching turns out to be the right decision for you, don’t expect it to be a quick fix. Let yourself rest, let yourself grieve, and let yourself take time to figure out what to do next or to make peace with the idea that you just don’t know what lies ahead.

We started Three Heads to help solve the problems that pushed us into leaving teaching. We want to be part of a team that keeps other teachers, maybe even you, in the classroom for a longer period of time. We want to help you be the best you can be with the many students who come through your doors. Whether it’s by offering encouragement, free resources, or the quality curriculum you’d create yourself if you had more time, we want to support you. We hope you’ll consider connecting with us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works.