Turning the Page
Taken on my last day.
I’m writing this on a day that I would usually be in the classroom with my students. We would be packing up getting ready for dismissal and I would be reminding them to either get something signed by their parents or to pick up pencils that have fallen to the ground. After dismissal, I would be prepping for the following day’s work, making copies, and meeting with teachers. I would tell myself to leave at 4 pm, but I most likely wouldn’t. I would stay at school too long and then still bring home work in a separate bag because those papers needed to be graded last week. But this is not what I’m doing today. My last day in my classroom was December 17th, 2021 and I am not starting the new year as a teacher.
I loved my job, but I was completely exhausted. I would stay up too late finishing grades, lesson plans, behavior plans, etc. Even when I would try to fall asleep I would be thinking about seating charts, parent emails, and wondering if tomorrow would be another day where I would need to evacuate my classroom because of a student melting down. I was worried about technology failing during an observation. Worried that a student would hit another kid or kick them. Worried that I, yet again, would have no time to plan at school because I was pulled into another “last-minute meeting”. Even waking up in the morning, I would be anxious to start my day because I knew how it would end. I would be mentally drained from having to make thousands of decisions all day long while managing poor student behavior and still having to teach state standards. I would be physically exhausted from being on my feet all day and hungry from not being able to finish my lunch in the twenty minutes that I had to eat. I would be beating myself up for not doing more, despite the fact that I (like each of my teammates) was putting 110% into everything that I was doing. I was so burnt out.
I have worked so hard over the last several years on creating boundaries for myself to help build a better work-life balance, but this job required me to bulldoze past those boundaries to try to complete a never ending to-do list that had at least ten things marked “priority”. It seemed like every year there was more that I had to do and less time to do it. It would be rare for me to have three planning periods a week. It felt like the second I finished something, it was being replaced with another task. I can only speak on my own experiences, but I know from talking with other teachers, that these experiences are common regardless of what campus or district you teach at.
If I’m being completely honest, I knew back in September that I might not be able to stay in education until the end of the school year. It makes me so sad, even now, to admit that because all I have wanted to do since I can remember was to be a teacher. I worked on that dream through middle school, high school, and graduated college with a degree in elementary education ready to finally start! Over the years, that dream has been beaten out of me with angry parents, screaming students, an insane workload, and an overall lack of respect for my profession by society. I wish that being a teacher was what I dreamed it would be.
I have absolutely loved building relationships with my students and teaching them in my classroom, I just wish that that was all being a teacher was. I wish I didn’t have to wear so many different hats: parent, counselor, nurse, peacemaker, protector, data analysist, paper pusher, the list goes on. It’s just too many hats for one person to wear. Even as I am writing this, I am missing my students and coworkers. I am worried about how my absence is affecting my students and hoping that my teammates aren’t having to do more work because I am not there. Making the decision to leave has been anything but easy.
As much as I have loved teaching, I knew that it was time for me to step away and turn the page. My mental health was suffering and I didn’t see it getting any better if I continued doing what I was doing. I thought that maybe I could make it till the end of the school year, but I would break down at the thought of having to stay until then. I was torn for so long about making this life-changing decision. In the end though, I had to make myself a priority. As a teacher, I never put myself first, but I wasn’t the teacher that I wanted for my students because I was so burnt out and unhappy. I deserved better and so did my students.
It’s hard for me to sum up this entire experience in one blog post, so I plan on writing and speaking more about this in future. I want to talk about what it looked like to transition out of the classroom, telling my students and coworkers (whom I still miss), and starting the next chapter in my life. Although this is one of the hardest decisions that I have made so far, I know that this is ultimately the best decision for me. Teaching and being a teacher will always be a part of who I am, but it is not all that I am.
