When a teacher quits, we all lose.
Leaving the profession doesn’t mean I won anything.
By the end of 2021 it was estimated that 1 in every 3 teachers were thinking about quitting. The problem has not gotten better since then, with 300,000 teaching vacancies nationwide. There doesn’t seem to be enough people willing to take the jobs either. And one of those jobs is mine.
As I come to terms with the very real fact that I will not be returning to the classroom anytime in the next year or two, I can’t help being angry about all the things I will lose.
The students I was teaching and would teach. The jokes and life stories I’d miss out on. Art projects made with passions, Math courses finally conquered with a B, the first great grade on an English project. Proms and graduations. First jobs and high school team victories. Homecoming celebrations, birthdays, college acceptances.
I don’t have my own kids. This isn’t a pity party statement — it is a truth that will never change because I don’t want my own. Never have, never will. I didn’t have a desire to procreate and put another depressed, anxious, ostracized girl on the planet.
But I had my kids. Teachers know what I mean. The second a student walks into your classroom they become your kid and that’s the end of that. I have so many kids I have actually lost count. Sure I could go through the class rosters over my 17 year career, but that wouldn’t get them all.
It would miss the ones who just wandered into my room after school for a chat. It doesn’t account for the students who were in a club I advised. The kids I mentored in summer camps wouldn’t be there either. And the siblings who knew about me from their older brother or sister who insisted I’m someone they had to meet.
My classroom used to be a place to hang when I was first starting out. Students would come in because they felt safe and accepted — their words, not mine — although that was always my intention. Since I didn’t have my own kids, I got to see things from the other side. I got to see who they were when they weren’t home. The good, bad, amazing and sad. And I got to see their triumphs and challenges, cheer them on at graduation and sometimes at later life events. I’ve grieved with many of them over lost peers, siblings and parents. And I buried more students then I like to admit, lost to drug overdoses, suicide and sometimes the cruelty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
All of that is closed to me now as I step away from teaching.
I’ll lose all of that connection and triumph; and yes pain.
I thought this was going to be a career for my life — that I’d be one of those teachers people joke about dying in the classroom — before teachers actually did, that is.
A few years ago I started to realize that a 40 or 50 year career in the classroom would not be my destiny. So I thought at least I’d make it to 30 years. Have a great career and retire into something else, my next stage.
Instead, due to health reasons caused from my profession I have to do what’s best for my health and leave. It is not the way I ever envisioned my career ending. I thought it would be planned with plenty of notice for all parties, myself included. The end of my career was supposed to be something I celebrated when I was old and happy, with all the students I had helped. Not brought by a health crisis that made it impossible for me to return to the career I poured my soul into for almost two decades. The ending is instead abrupt and necessary, with the losses piling up.
Loss of career, coworkers, students, routine, a stable salary, and identity. In the struggle to leave this career there has been years of looking for stable employment. But that has not occurred and so I am looking at losing my home, my pet, and my ability to afford healthcare when I need it most.
It’s just loss after loss after loss.
So many people in social media discourse tell teachers if they don’t like it just leave, as if it’s what we all really want to do. I’m one of those teachers who’s being forced to choose between my health and life and the career I built that life around. I know in the end it will be better for me in the long-run sort of way. But it’s doesn’t mean I’ve won anything.
Elizabeth Schap is an adultish woman, trying to figure her life out, now that nothing is what it seems. She works a lot of jobs like everyone else you probably know and sometimes writes on this platform. Mainly because she is confused about which platform to use to try and get a little change thrown her way. (She realizes to have change truly thrown at her she should become a stripper, but she is not that talented. It is what it is.)
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