Letting My Teaching License Expire
My Teaching License Expired!
My teaching license expired last month. The renewal date came and went and I wasn’t on the fence, not even a little. Having been out of the classroom for a few years now, there is no going back.
Maybe if I had stayed abroad and continued to teach in international schools I wouldn’t have burned out so hard, but teaching in the United States is exhausting. At the end of the day, I had nothing left to give for myself, my loved ones, and my community, which was not sustainable.
So the question I pondered last month was this: What would it take for me to remain teaching? I came up with a list of non-negotiables, and sadly, teaching in America just cannot meet these conditions currently.
Here’s what it would have taken for me to stay in the classroom:
Liveable wage: My salary wasn’t enough for me to live anywhere near the school where I was teaching, which is so often the case in big cities. I had to work four part-time jobs to pay off my student loans.
Trust: Teachers are patronized all day every day. Parents and administrators challenge their professional judgment in a way that would not be tolerated in any other field. The lack of faith in my capability as an educator wore me down over time, as I had to justify every curriculum and classroom management choice I made.
Flexible schedule: Oftentimes I wouldn’t actually have students in front of me until 10:00 AM but I would still have to be in the door by 7:10 AM because that was my contract. It’s not about having enough adults on campus for the students; every student was always in a class with an adult. Forcing teachers to be on campus the entire day, even when they aren’t teaching, is about control. To have had the freedom to leave when my classes were done and do my grading in the afternoon from a coffee shop would have been a game-changer.
Admin with integrity: So many rotten administrators, principals, and bureaucrats lead schools with no clue as to the experience of teachers in the trenches. I came to resent school leadership and it seemed to me like every line manager I had was either incompetent or a bully. The good ones burn out and can’t last. (The leaders at my school in Hong Kong were the exception; they were kind, talented, and all around good people).
Professional support and growth: When I was promoted to a Head of Department, my school never invested in any sort of leadership development for me. They didn’t provide a mentor, or any guidance or support of any kind. That is unacceptable. Luckily for me, my school in Hong Kong had already sent me through a leadership program, which only goes to show that overseas international schools treat teachers way better than schools in America.
Guarantees of safety: Students got away with bringing weapons on campus and not facing any disciplinary consequences because administrators feared parents multiple times during my tenure as a teacher. I didn’t want useless, reactive school shooter training; I wanted my employer to proactively take steps to prevent school shootings.
Healthy boundaries: Teaching is a job and should be respected as such. Instead, teachers are taken advantage of and asked to take on more responsibility every year. They are guilt-tripped into chaperoning or supervising just one more thing through this manipulative tactic: “but don’t you care about the children?”
My former colleagues and students know that my heart was in it. Teaching was my calling, even when it evolved into an emotionally abusive relationship. It took a lot of therapy, a great support network, and a solid emergency fund to feel like I could leave.
And that’s why I let my teaching license expire.
Extra Resources: Here’s a great little PBS Documentary: A Brief But Spectacular Take on Teacher Burnout. And one of my best friends was interviewed for the podcast On Point: How to fix the growing discipline problem in the United States.
