Teachers aren’t supposed to be negative, right?

But why is it sometimes an objectively positive statement that feels like a sucker punch to your soul?

Why have you been in a bad mood for hours just because somebody said, “They don’t care what you know until they know that you care?”

I’ve always loved speaking at new teacher orientations.

These speeches have been one of my favorite forms of time travel—a way of visiting that past version of myself who was sitting in a squeaky chair in a Houston auditorium, taking notes in a double-wide binder, trying to plan my first day lesson without having any real sense of how a class full of nine-year-olds would act.

Most of the time, when you’re going through emails, you’re just trying to keep up. And that’s fine.

But every now and then, it’s time to deep clean your inbox.

Deep cleaning your inbox is different than just going through your emails because as you go along, you’re putting systems in place to make things easier to handle in the long term.

This post goes along with my YouTube Video on this topic. In both the post and video, my hope is to go past the obvious advice and help you turn your inbox into a space that is manageable for you in the long-term.

Fun fact: I do a small amount of personalized message training and storytelling training for educators.

There are a limited number of available slots for this and they are mostly filled by direct referrals, but I love putting my highly specific, educator-novelist nerd skills to work during these conversations.

Teaching isn’t for everyone, but leaving teaching is a big decision.

Here are some things to consider first.

The basic pros and cons of quitting your teaching job

• What are the pros that immediately spring to mind about quitting your job?
• What are the cons that immediately spring to mind that might make quitting a bad idea?

Technically, you could stop here.

But you might not want to.