People keep asking me why I ended my teaching career, and it's a difficult question to answer. Most of the time I feel I have to justify it, because obviously the only reason someone would quit teaching is if he/she were no longer altruistic enough to put up with the unpleasantness of the profession for the good of the children. As if the fact that I quit means that I no longer care about the future of America's kids or something. I will explain in allegory, in order to avoid the negativity attached to specifics.
One day I was walking down an interstate. There were lots of people, and I was pretty confused. I saw a bridge with some of the railing broken off, and below it was a very large lake, in which a multitude of kids were noisily splashing around. It looked kind of like swimming lessons, so I jumped in.
But pretty quickly I realized that the splashing around wasn't playing or swimming. Off to the side there was someone working with a group of them on synchronized swimming and water aerobics, but most of the kids were drowning, having been crammed into a bus driven by a drunk driver that sent it flying off the bridge and crashing into the water before I got there. My first instinct was to drag all the kids out of the water so they wouldn't drown.
Some people yelled at me to teach them to swim, but I looked down and saw that someone had tied my hands behind my back. The best I could do was bob around, gasping for air when I surfaced, and hold my breath when I was under the water line. Most of the kids were in a similar situation. Some of them knew how to swim, so they were okay, but there were a lot of them stuck in water too deep for their heads to surface.
I asked the people standing on the edge of the water—they must have been lifeguards—if they could help, or at least untie my hands. They told me all I had to do was teach the kids how to breathe underwater and everything would be fine.
Yeah. That's what it felt like.
In spite of the media claim that teachers are leaving the profession in droves, I haven't seen much of that. The only other former teachers I know are the ones who got advanced degrees and went into academia--and they are still teachers dealing with offshoots of the same issues.
Maybe it's true that all those "veteran" teachers are more altruistic than I am. Maybe they really do care more about the kids of America's future. Maybe I just wasn't strong enough to persevere in a good cause. Maybe I have a martyr complex and felt more responsibility than I should have. I am idealistic, but I'm not an idealogue, and I don't find fulfillment in devoting myself to causes in which I am given accountability disproportionate to my authority. It was four years I will never get back, and while I don't regret it, I can't do it again. I'm glad I did it because I learned so much, and I really hope that I was a positive influence on my kids as well. I sure did try to be. I'm even more glad that I was blessed to be able to change careers, and that I can go to work and live my life without that crushing, demoralizing anxiety and guilt I used to feel every day.
