20 Years In – Why I Quit Teaching and What’s Next

and now that i don't have a principal who's gonna check in with me on monday morning about what i put on my youtube channel i feel kind of free to say some of the things that i haven't been able to say over the past few years hey everyone welcome back to the channel today we are having a difficult conversation inspired by blog reader jyn she sent me this question and i think it's a really important one and definitely something that's crossed all of our minds um she asks could we maybe address the elephant in the room and that being why so many incredibly amazing teachers are leaving or looking to leave the profession yeah jen i'll talk about that as you guys know i am one of those teachers who's not in the classroom right now and it's partly covid ish but there's a lot of other factors that i weighed in making that decision too so i'm going to talk about that today um when covet hit i know you guys know lots of us were talking about early retirement who's leaving who's coming back people were scared rightly so the demands of the job just seemed to be getting bigger and bigger and bigger and so i had remembered reading articles about teacher retirement applications like soaring so i jumped on after i saw jin's question and i knew i wanted to make this video i jumped on and tried to do some research and apparently the numbers are all over the place there is no one set number about you know teacher retirement applications went up this much in 2020 to 2021. 20-20-21 it seems like it's regionally very different some places it's very high some places it's actually lower the percentage of retirement applications than it was pre-coded so it's all sort of a big mismatch and i don't know what's fear just people talking and what's real but i do know that teacher retention has always been a problem even in the best of times um it's almost a revolving door at some of our schools because the job is just really really hard even in the best of times right low pay not a lot of appreciation for what we do um uh being a scapegoat in a lot of situations and so for the best of times this is hard work throw in a global pandemic a bunch of teachers who are asked to teach remotely without the technology or the training and it's darn near impossible and yet teachers are the kinds of people who take on those sorts of challenges right like we knew from the start that this was going to be a tough career we knew that it was low paid for the bulk of work we do and the tons of responsibility we have put on our shoulders and we were good with that right like as a younger teacher you just you find ways to work within the system you you know find grading hacks and you find your groove and your teacher personality because it's worth it in the end for those relationships that we're making with the kids um but over time with more and more responsibilities put on our shoulders and fewer and fewer resources given to meet those challenges it makes me think of that meme of the giving tree which i the giving tree shel silverstein is copyrighted so i can't put it up here but basically this tree is giving everything to this little boy um and at some point you've just got to put healthy boundaries and say no you can't have my shade and my apples and my branches and tear down my trunk and then sit on my stump you have to be like no so i'm at that point where i was feeling like i was giving up a lot of my branches and not having the reward of the relationships with the kids anymore in this covet environment makes me not want to be in the classroom right now and now that i don't have a principal who's going to check in with me on monday morning about what i put on my youtube channel i feel kind of free to say some of the things that i haven't been able to say over the past few years so i'm going to talk about what i see as like the big cultural like system problems and then i'm going to talk about some like individual things that are just specific to me that led to this decision okay so up first system problems i think america is fooling itself i love my country and i love being an american don't get me wrong but there's a huge difference between what we say we value and what we actually value in practice so we say as americans that we believe in determination and hard work and self-sacrifice and yet we actually tilt toward what's fast and easy and most comfortable and so i see this in lots of things not not just within education although i see it here too i see it in the you know the way we take care of our health right so we say we value healthy living but we don't do the hard work of taking care of ourselves right the getting out and being physically active we'll you know say we value like you know highly nutritious food but you know there's a line for in-n-out burger that goes around the block right so and i understand about balance don't lecture me i know but tends to be that we go for what's easy um america we say we are this is we are say we are one nation indivisible but we're really divided we're not one nation we're a bunch of different nations and a bunch of different competing interests and we haven't figured it out yet we say we believe in liberty justice for all there's a lot of injustice in our world so again the chasm between what we say we are and what we say we value and what we actually are and what we actually value in practice and i see this in education too we say we value education but we don't fund it we don't respect it right like we we have class sizes of 35 kids you tell me you want me to make great writers and critical thinkers but oftentimes it feels like uh i am crowd control right um so not having the resources to do the job right has been a source of frustration for me for a long time so class sizes are crazy there's no money for the supplies that we need to do our job that's on the teacher's back our own salaries we dip into to buy the things that our kids need which there's no other job that i know of where professionals have to like bring in their own stuff to do the job that the boss needs them to do so that's a problem um the curriculum is just tired and out of date there's nothing innovative happening there it's just the the system that was purchased 15 years ago and has been in the back cabinet and we just use what we've always used because that's what we have so yeah that's a frustration it's frustrating to me that culturally teachers are held up as heroes and then six weeks later are torn down as villains right like once coveted hit and remote learning started happening and parents actually saw like the scope of what we were doing every day they were amazed but then very quickly irritated that it was on their shoulders it's hard and i'm really grateful that my kids are older and i didn't have to teach online and teach my own kids in my own house like i get i can't i don't even know how you how you mamas are doing it right now man i am i am humbled by everything that's happening out there the structure of school hasn't evolved to match the realities of the world today right like we're still using that industrial revolution model of you know the kids in the rows for the set number of hours you do one hour of math one hour of you know english one hour of history um and we just switch switch switch and the brain you know does it learn that way best i don't think so right but we're so locked into this structure that to change it would be revolutionary and so kids are frustrated with the system teachers are frustrated with the system but we have to work within the system we have and for me there's a lot of tension in that like i don't like complaining about things i unless i have a solution but the problem is i don't know how to fix this i don't have a solution to like change the entire american public school education systems structures i don't know so there's all that right these big structural problems with the way the whole system is set up and then there's my personal struggles that i'm having for my own reasons and so let's talk about some of those first up i don't care about testing i don't care about state tests i don't care about college interest entrance exams i don't even care about actual grades in my class i don't care about grades i care about learning i care about connection and passion and yet i have to demonstrate learning goals um and be data driven um when i can just like i just want to teach i just want to take a kid from here to here have them not love writing and then actually be proud of a piece of writing that they created like i just want it to be organic like that i know it's kind of hippy dippy i know but the data so when i was a younger teacher i'd say around year five the like five to eight years like years five through eight i was really into data i was like i'm gonna i'm gonna figure out this system i'm gonna tweak what i do in my class and then measure results and what i found is that different classes responded differently to different strategies and approaches go figure and so teaching is an art it is not a science there is no formula there's no um guaranteed output it's not a factory these aren't widgets these are human children and there are human teachers teaching them and so for all of our flaws and differences and craziness that's all part of the mix and so it's an art figuring out how to help this kid find a book that she really loves for the first time ever or how to help this kid have the self-confidence to get up and speak in front of a group of peers for the first time without feeling like they're gonna pass out like there are wonderful moments that happen that aren't measured by a statistic on a data spreadsheet a problem with all of that is that i it's hard for me to hide my disdain i don't have a poker face so when i am required to get kids hyped for the state test i cannot do that in a convincing way anymore i tried i tried to be a good soldier i really did but the kids know i don't care about the test like i don't care it doesn't make me feel like a good or bad teacher depending on how they do because i know i'm in there doing the work when i'm in there with them and yet there's pressure to get those numbers up keep those numbers high so that we look good on a state report so they can put it in the school report card on the website and the realtors can tell the families moving into the district that we're the best district well you know what i don't i don't want to play that game i've also seen some pettiness and some things that are just wrong i've seen administrators cut teachers off at the knees because they don't respect them for whatever personal reasons they have um just making decisions just to mess with people it's just wrong and i've seen great administrators but i've seen more lousy administrators and sometimes the unfairness just slapped me across the face so when i was your book advisor i had access to the class lists because we would pack every english classes book order in may at the end of the year and then my yearbook kids would deliver them to all the different classrooms so we spent like two days packing all the orders and then another two days doing dollies to wheel them out all over campus which was a very humane way to pass out yearbooks hard on the lower back but definitely like easy on the student body but in doing that what i came to realize was that it it was not an equitable distribution of teaching assignments so i had thought foolishly as a young teacher that they would balance classes so like every third period freshman english class would have about the same number of students and yeah some periods are smaller or bigger than others just depending on what the master's schedule needed no not necessarily uh turns out uh i would have two teachers who had the exact same prep the exact same period one teacher who was seen as difficult rigid not easy to get along with kids didn't like like her for whatever reason had like 18 kids in a section the same class would have 35 kids so explain to me how is it fair that one teacher has 18 and another has almost double that at 35 kids sandwiched into a room and i was one of those teachers who had giant class sizes all the time and i would just always say yes like the counseling office would you know say hey we have another student coming in i'm like i don't have enough desks i'm like we'll get you another desk okay not realizing until i got to see kind of behind the scenes it's just super unfair and so if you're good at your job and you're big-hearted and you're agreeable you get taken advantage of in a system that doesn't care about you the individual teacher as much as it should and that's that giving tree idea right oh you just took another branch so i'm doing double the workload double the grading you know just double it's just hard it's just it was unfair and i saw it and it was wrong and in some ways it is kind of my own fault i burned myself out in some ways one i didn't push back against those things when i saw them i just kind of accepted them and let it kind of do a slow boil but then also in my zeal for innovation and connection you know i jumped online uh eight years ago to kind of share ideas and build community and like find that kind of you know digital teachers lounge of uplifting i mean the tagline on my blog is on a mission to prevent english teacher burnout right because i was feeling it then and i needed to build that for myself and for everybody else but in doing that the irony is that i burned myself out right so when i started all the digital stuff in gosh 2013 um it was great it was a hobby it was fun and as i gained more people and voices and i sold more stuff online it kind of grew to become not just a hobby but like a business and then i had customers who needed help with things and so all of a sudden i'm working all day teaching and i'm working all afternoon and evening on business stuff and it became a lot everything you've seen with my name on it online is stuff i've done i don't have virtual assistants and a team or anything it's me with a camera and so or or a computer i mean this this laptop you me and this laptop have gotten a lot of work done over the years um and so at some point um i the wheels were falling off the cart as my husband said he's like you need to slow down and so you've seen there's been pockets where i'm really productive and then i just i kind of i kind of withdraw because it's really hard to to run so fast so hard all the time um it starts to get to you after a while don't misunderstand i love it and i love helping all my teacher colleagues out there and i love answering questions and having the connection it's just a lot you know when you're teaching you know you're in the classroom with the kids turn off the phone i'm not like online in that world and then the brunch break comes and you flip on your phone and there's like four messages three of which are teachers having trouble accessing some materials there's a broken prezi link or the pdf downloader i don't know what to do about this thing and i want to help those people because i'm i am one of those people i know what it's like when you have a lesson plan that you have to do in an hour and you go to like launch the slide deck and the stupid thing won't work so now you're like oh my gosh you're in panic mode and so i want to be able to help everyone as quickly as i can um and that's really hard to do all the time so now i'll be more available to help i try to i try to answer everybody within an hour but what that means is like i'm always of two minds right i'm dealing with the kid right in front of my face here while i'm also thinking about that email i need to send and that's unfair to both and it's stressing me out another personal reason is that starting over is hard i have learned i've moved a lot my husband and i have lived uh eight different houses in 20 years which maybe that's not a lot like military families i think they move more than that but for me that's a lot and so when we moved to idaho that was four years ago we left california we went to idaho i struggled um i didn't really talk about it because i didn't want to alienate my colleagues and my administrators and i just don't like to complain but it was really hard i went from being kind of a you know respected village elder at my california school to being the the new lady who she um and that was hard for my ego but also it was just hard making inroads with people who were very polite but not really that interested in changing how things were um and so i taught uh ninth grade eleven no ninth grade i thought tenth grade i did eleventh grade um at the traditional high school which was very much like the school that i had come from um i really didn't find my place um it was fine i had um success teaching at our library where i was doing classes but it was always a different group of students cycling into those classes so while it was creative and fun and the library people were phenomenal one of the favorite groups of people that i've ever worked with i love that core group it didn't satisfy the reason i love teaching which is that relationship building with the students taking them from the beginning of the year at the end of the year and so the library job was a fun job for me but it wasn't it wasn't like feeding my soul like teaching used to do and then this fall i took a i took a gig teaching sixth grade writing because it would allow me to continue face-to-face one-on-one it meant i didn't have to do the remote learning and um i love sixth graders adorable um but not not my lane sixth graders are babies they are babies i was like they're just really really young and so ninth grade and eleventh grade that's my jam like i love 14 15 i love 16 17. high school seniors i love high school seniors in the fall i do not love them in the spring high school sophomores i love a few of you so sophomore to me is like the dead zone of the high school years so i was like so when i took the sixth grade gig in the fall i was like this is gonna be something new and after a few months of that i was like this is not for me that leads me to another reason that i went ahead and decided uh to leave the classroom and that was finances so uh husband and i we're living in boise idaho which if you watch the news is the number one exploding real estate market in the nation uh it is beautiful in idaho and we definitely enjoyed our time there um but there really wasn't anything keeping us there and when we saw what our house was worth after living there for four years we were like uh we could live somewhere else so we went ahead and cashed out of boise idaho which gives us a little pocket of money to sit on and enjoy and maybe like use that money to um catch our breath i make money selling stuff online and that has been very good for my family and so thank you for helping my family uh enjoy the life we get to enjoy um and so that was there's a financial thing to think about also i don't talk a lot about my personal life i tend to be kind of a private person online i love talking about teaching and professional stuff but the personal feels scary to me so i'm going to share a little personal here um and we'll see what happens um so even before covid my family had some health crises um some scary stuff happened and um turns out my husband uh almost died uh so three years ago he was at work uh works for fedex he was in logistics and he collapsed um and then he collapsed again at home and we got him in and it turns out he has a bad heart so there's a genetic condition called non-compaction which i call squishy heart that basically just means like part of the heart that should be smooth strong muscle is more like a sponge so his heart doesn't tick great and so he has a pacemaker and that's a lot to go through but the gift from that time is that it really helped us sit down and evaluate what's important to us as a couple he's fine now everything's good he's like my little robo man he's got his little you know like his he's like the tin man with his ticking heart and so he's good and i'm good and we're good so don't worry everything's fine um and it really brought into focus for both of us what's important and what's important is our family and um loving each other and putting good things out into the world um so we have slowed down a little bit because of that he and i are definitely achievers for go go go kind of people and so it's definitely forced us to kind of pause um kovid helped the whole world pause we were just about a year and a half before covet we'd already kind of gotten that message and then copen just reinforced it and then also my own parents died young so my dad died in a car accident at age 48 my mom died of a stroke at 62. i am now in that zone and i i want my my life to matter and i want to do good things and i love teaching and it makes me sad that i'm not with the kids right now because i i just love them um but i'm also thinking about legacy you know like i want my life to matter so legacy that's what matters to me i want my work to live on after i'm gone and so how can i use what's inside of me to help the most people teach the most people expand my reach and just leave something that's awesome and so when i think about teaching here in tennessee yes i could walk that idaho path again and try to make inroads at a school after jumping through a bunch of hoops to get my credential which i'm really not excited about um and maybe i'll help 100 200 kids next year or i could dig in here and help you and i can continue to make tools that help kids get excited about the classroom and when i think about that my heart gets big and so it's really hard for me to to not be in the classroom right now um but it's also the right thing for me right now and then as i've been struggling with this this is not a new conversation this is something my husband and i have been talking about for the last few years about what i want my life and career to be he made a point that actually finally won it for me he said you know what laura go all in on the curriculum if you don't like it you know what you can do you can go get another teaching job like it's not that's the other thing i want everyone to think about like if you're like me struggling about you know you're having that like i don't know how much longer i can do this job kind of thought if there's something else that you want to do and you can go do go try it life is short go do that thing if you don't like that thing you can go do another thing or you can go back to teaching they are always going to need us that's the thing and we don't make that much money so it's really easy to replace that salary i don't know if it's really easy but it's certainly possible so jen wow this video got weepy i just i'm feeling this topic and i knew it was important and for something for us to talk about so you guys are you thinking about leaving like do you know anybody who left because of covid in my circle of like real life teacher friends in my network i don't know anybody else who's not in the classroom right now everybody's gone back um because again we've got bills to pay i get it and i have a few more options than some of my other teacher friends um do you know people who have left because of code or because of other reasons leave it below talk about if you're thinking about leaving what are the factors that are taking you there what else might you want to do it's okay um it's all teaching even this youtube channel it's still teaching so you have permission to live your life in the way that you want to live your life and i'm here let's talk about it it's a hard conversation but it's super super important that we just get clear and honest about what we want our lives to be i want my life to be about helping you and that's what i'm just going to keep doing so thanks for if you made it to the video i apologize for the waterworks i just feel things strongly passionately all right you guys uh check in with me send me a message i hope you're well stay strong know that you're not alone in feeling the feels that you have thinking the thoughts that you're thinking okay bye you

Channel: Laura Randazzo

Views: 163,089

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Id: vD0BGzNN0Yk

Length: 27min 30sec (1650 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021