If you’ve been reading a lot lately about teachers leaving the profession, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered both the thoughtful, pros-and-cons career-change content and the viral “why I quit teaching” stories.
Either way, you may be wondering whether it’s time to leave the classroom yourself.
I’ve been working with teachers for over 20 years and I want to be clear: I do believe there are valid reasons to quit teaching, and I don’t believe the profession is for everyone. But I also believe that too many teachers quit too soon and for the wrong reasons.
The purpose of this post is to make sure that’s not what’s going on with you.
This is not a guilt trip about how much the kids need you.
I’m assuming you don’t need that kind of pep talk.
I’m assuming you’re a dedicated teacher who is craving practical, emotionally honest advice so that you can make the best decision possible.
Here are the five things I recommend you do before making the decision to leave the classroom.
1. Make Sure You’re Not Running on a Sleep Deficit
This one is pretty basic, but we have to get it out of the way first.
Every now and then someone asks me: What is the one piece of advice you would give to any teacher? This is it. Not sleeping enough is the quickest way to become a worse version of yourself.
When you haven’t slept enough, you become forgetful, you become impatient, you get worse at making decisions and at critical thinking, and you are more likely to overreact. Does that sound like the type of teacher you are trying to be?
That’s just a summary of the huge amount of sleep-related research out there — plus, you know this from your own experience. Personally, when I look back at my most regrettable moments in the classroom, they almost all happened when I got far less sleep than I should have the night before.
The good news is that this is one area of your professional life where you can make a change almost immediately. You probably can’t turn your classroom management around in one day, but you can take a nap this afternoon and definitely aim for a good night of sleep tonight.
This also means that if you’re in a season of life when you’re not able to get as much sleep as you know you should, you want to factor that into a major life decision like changing careers.
2. Start Thinking of Teaching as a Job
More specifically, start thinking of teaching as a job you can get better at — rather than a calling you’re not feeling passionately enough about.
A lot of advice about teaching is framed as: You’re doing the most important work in the world! Failure is not an option! But sometimes what you actually want to say is: This is all the time and energy I have. Can someone please tell me what I should really spend it on? And no one will tell you, because they don’t want to say that maybe you should spend less time on this other thing that people also told you was extremely important.
When we talk about teaching as a calling that comes directly from your soul, or a mission where failure is not an option, it becomes really hard to have the kind of honest conversation about trade-offs we’d have if we were just talking about a job you want to do well — which, of course, it is. Because it’s important.
Teachers’ time, effort, and emotional bandwidth are some of the most finite resources in education. If you’re in a state of mind where you’re considering leaving teaching entirely, there may be some improvements you can make in your professional life that you might have thought of as selfish, but are actually more like turning down the treadmill speed so that you can keep up.
And to be clear, this is not the same as quiet quitting. Quiet quitting means purposely doing the bare minimum not to get fired while mentally disengaging from your job — and that does not seem like an enjoyable or rewarding way to teach. This is about something else: getting your teaching into what’s known as the optimal zone of challenge.
3. Find Your Optimal Zone of Challenge
The optimal zone of challenge refers to the ideal level of difficulty in a task or situation — that sweet spot between coasting on autopilot and constantly feeling like you’re drowning. And no one knows better than you which direction that dial needs to be turned.
If you’re in a constant state of overwhelm, you want to turn the dial toward making your life easier. But stagnation feels terrible too. It doesn’t feel good to do the same thing in the same way every single day. I know people love to say that no two days in teaching are the same — but sometimes they kind of are.
I taught Romeo and Juliet 36 times to high school freshmen. By the end of those 36 times, I knew exactly where in the recorded version of the play you could hear saliva coming out of the voice actors’ mouths.
Feeling like teaching is boring and tedious can lead to burnout just as surely as feeling overwhelmed. So pay attention to that dial of how challenged you feel, and adjust it as needed.
4. Pay Attention to Availability Bias — and Use It to Your Advantage
Availability bias (also called the availability heuristic) is a mental shortcut built into the way we think. When we’re evaluating a situation, we tend to rely on information that pops into our heads easily — and a lot of the time, that depends on stories we’ve been exposed to recently.
If someone describes a terrible car accident right before you get behind the wheel, you’re going to be edgy while driving, because your brain will feel like everyone on the road is about to crash into you.
This applies directly to teaching because of what I think of as the “teaching sucks” genre of content. It’s not a coincidence that people like to watch videos of teachers explaining why they’re leaving. It can feel therapeutic when someone finally tells the truth about how hard the job is — especially if you feel like you’ve been getting advice that’s artificially positive and dismisses your real concerns.
But we live in a world of algorithms. Anything that’s been holding your attention lately, you’re going to see a whole lot more of. And if you’ve spent an entire evening watching teachers explain why they left the profession, you have a lot of those stories readily available to your mind when you walk into your own classroom the next day.
Suddenly that student with their head down in the back of the room becomes a portal to an entire universe of frustrations. Why are kids so disrespectful? Why don’t they care anymore? Why are you expected to —
I know this because I did it to myself without realizing it.
There was an education blogger I used to read during my lunch period at school, especially on frustrating days. He was hilarious and made a lot of good points, but there was a bitter undercurrent to the humor. One day, my after-lunch class came in and I remember gazing out at their faces one by one and thinking: I don’t like you. I don’t like you. I don’t like you either. It had to do with something I’d just read in that blog. At the time it felt almost comical — no one knows what I’m thinking — but suddenly it became so much harder to teach that already-challenging class. The burden of it felt physically heavier.
It was only years later, after reading more about brain science, that I understood there’s actually a scientific basis for why that day felt so much worse. Your interpretation of what’s in front of you will have some effect on the brain chemistry that controls your mood.
Which brings me back to that student with their head on the desk. There’s no reason not to respond in line with your classroom rules — enforce them. But you can still choose, internally, how you interpret the student’s action. Maybe you tell yourself: this student probably had a hard night. Or if it’s a student who does this chronically and works your nerves chronically, maybe you’re able to say: in ten years, this student may look back on how they acted in high school and not be that proud. Many of us can relate to that feeling.
So how do you use availability bias to your advantage? Look for sources of information that offer a more generous take on humanity. It’s very easy to go online and find the worst possible examples of human behavior. But it is possible to seek out things that give you a slightly more generous attitude toward people. Keep in mind that what the algorithm is feeding you right now is likely to be a factor in how much you enjoy teaching — and it could even be a factor in your decision about whether the profession is right for you.
5. Make All the Lists
The final recommendation before you decide whether or not to end your teaching career: make all of the lists that people suggest you make before a big life decision.
Here are some suggested lists to make before you decide to quit your teaching job.
Consider your students, your future career possibilities, your finances, what you’d like in a future job, what you do or don’t want from work in general. Get all of your concerns down on paper. Anything you think you should make a list about — make that list.
Now you have a lot of lists. What do you do with them?
Put them somewhere safe and go get some sleep before you look at them again.
I realize that circles back to the very first piece of advice in this post — but in some cases, that really is the most important one. I can’t tell you whether teaching is the right career for you. But I can tell you that you should get some sleep before you make any big decisions at all.
Try it. See how things look in the morning.