My first year as a teacher, I started a soccer team at my school.

It seemed like a good way to show my students that I cared about what they cared about.

That I cared about them. 

That I would stop at nothing to be exactly the teacher they’d always needed, who would use their success in the sport they loved to propel them to academic achievement, not only in my class but for the rest of their lives. 

I was going to be That Teacher.

The only thing standing in my way was that I truly did not know anything about soccer.

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.

Recently I was talking with a teacher in a one-on-one session, and she mentioned that she’d like to regain her sense of possibility as a teacher.

Afterward, I kept coming back to that phrase: sense of possibility.

And the more I turned it over, the more I realized that a sense of possibility is, in many ways, the opposite of burnout.

So, let’s talk about what it actually means to have a sense of possibility, and how you can hold onto it (or get it back if you’ve lost it).

Around the eight-year mark of my own teaching career, a colleague told me about the “eight-year burnout cycle” for teachers.

Something about the seven-to-nine-year mark, she said, made teachers start to wonder if they could do the job for much longer.

The truth is, I don’t know if there is actual research behind this; the whole concept is more of something I heard through the teacher grapevine.

But it was true for me.

This is the last post in a series on AI and teaching.

I purposely left the topic of teaching writing for last, because while working on this series of videos and posts, I very consciously looked for ways that AI could help me save time and effort.

In this last segment, my hope was to be able to share a few tips based on my own experience writing and making videos about this topic.

First the good news: there were ways that AI helped me save time and effort.

But also… this series on AI and teaching has taken more time and more work on my part than almost any other topic I’ve ever covered.

That tension, it turns out, makes a pretty good jumping-off point for talking about how to teach writing in the age of AI.