Why I Quit Teaching

Teaching was the natural path for me, but the career isn’t designed to sustain those who cannot give so much for so little.

Teachers like to tell themselves that education is a vocation, a calling that spoke out to them over all the other glitzy, broey, financially affirming career paths. They choose this low-paying, admin-overloaded path out of some inherent instinct to serve. The calling sustains them through the recurring avalanches of marking and emails, the insistent and sometimes fabulously unaware parents, the corporatized pull to produce results, the teen snark. Most teachers feel that they are doing something vital and that the work in the classroom, is a unique service. It’s pastoral. It’s ministerial.

For most of my career as a high school English teacher, I believed in the vocation. It sustained me too – until it didn’t. When the propulsion to serve and connect and uplift vanished, there wasn’t much left to keep me going. It was also a role that emerged from a time in my life when I was different. I’ll write in Part II about the role my identity and the politics around it played in the arcing of my career out of the classroom. In this part, I want to focus on the core of the job itself – how it works so tantalizingly, but it’s unstable, unrealistically constructed … and implodes rapidly.

The Call and the Service

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a teacher. When I was six, I’d force my poor younger brother to sit through mock lessons in my room. I loved the idea of teaching, the vibe of teaching and the persona of an educator. There was something thrilling in conveying knowledge and skills, in empowerment and in seeing it all ignite in front of me. At school, I knew I wanted to be on the other side of the classroom. I hardly ever doubted that. So when it came time to apply to university, I only applied for an education degree. I knew I’d get in and that the path was right. It was natural and progressive and inherent. Some people did try to dissuade me, assuring me that I’d never make much money and the job would be taxing, but the internal drive overwhelmed the reservations. You could say I felt the call and heeded it.

My first year was brutal. The second was better, but it took a long time to work out how to be in the classroom around teenagers, feeling at times outnumbered by dangerous foes and overwhelmed by the seriousness with which they took what I said. It took me a good five years of feet-finding and muddle before I found my vibe.

I realized after about five years that what I enjoyed most wasn’t the academics and core classroom teaching (though I did love them), but the connections I had with my students. I thrived in the relationality of my job. Sometimes I could get through to the stubborn kids or the those who seemed completely disinterested in my subject. I found value and meaning when some of the older ones needed advice on a sticky teen breakup saga or someone to listen to a rant about the minutiae of high school friendships. Three times in my career, students chose me as the adult they needed to reach out to when they were at risk of harm. Nothing quite comes close to that piqued sensation, the realization I was somehow, illogically, the one person those kids felt they could trust enough to ask for help when they needed the most urgent and desperate help possible. Guiding them to school counsellors and helping them find the support systems they needed form the most impactful moments I have ever encountered as a human being. At times like that, teaching was exquisitely human and connective and impactful.

Not all teachers, especially in the secondary education space, can, want or need to play that role – and, to be clear, it’s a different arc of specialization, not a requirement – but for me it was what got me to work every day, even when the rest of the job felt tedious or, as it became eventually, too much.

The Misconception

When people heard I was a teacher, they often responded with one of two reactions: a stunned pity that I chose mediocre income when I ‘could do anything with that brain!’, or an eye-rolled scoff that the ‘holidays are so long!’ and the ‘hours are short!’, as if my life were blissful and my schedule open. It’s a myth. A profound myth.

Yes, there is more leave technically than most full-time professions and, yes, formal school hours tend to be shorter than in many jobs, but teaching isn’t a knock-off-and-relax-at-home career. Classroom work is just one component of the job, proportionally quite a small one. There might be some free periods, but they’re eaten up by department meetings, printing, marking, admin, emails and a myriad other things. Even break time isn’t really a break: many schools make teachers do break supervision and many end up using the time for admin anyway. And if you're on campus and around students, even outside of class, you are always the adult, always approachable, always alert in case you’re needed or kids are getting up to something. At work, you have to be the moral authority, always put together, always responsible and somehow always on top of a workload that is mammoth. There is an expectation that teachers are involved in extramural work and additional duties, all of which is supposed to be done to help out, go the extra mile and be a team player in the service of the school and the students. School hours have a way of extending and stretching like gluey goo. It’s all without additional compensation, because why would practitioners of public service want to shill like that? So you give of yourself emotionally to fulfil the base requirements of the work, and then invest even more, serving and supporting and committing and being present because you care and and because you must.

At home, it’s time to mark. And catchup on admin. And prep lessons. And respond to emails. And recover, somehow, in between all that. Even holidays – even technical leave – ends up for so many the perfect time finally to get to the planing or marking backlog that there was not time or mental bandwidth for during the term. The job tumbles out of the campus into the nooks of the teacher’s life. It’s endless.

And English teachers have it worst. The marking load for home language teachers at high school level is objectively the largest and most complex of any subject. Marking isn’t just looking for keywords and ticking. A language marker reads for accuracy, coherence, argumentation and expression simultaneously, even in the simplest comprehension test. If you’ve never taught English before, just try marking a 600-word essay once. It’s brutal. And see how long it took you.

So often, I found myself emotionally drained, but because a kid needed some extra tutoring or was falling apart and I was the only because he wanted to open to or the school needed someone to cover an extra class, I went further. I invested. It felt almost holy to keep caring even when I had little left to give.

Outgrowth

I chose teaching when I was a different person – almost literally. I studied education and taught for five years as a closeted gay Mormon. In 2019, I came out publicly (through writing) and a year later, left the Mormon Church (again, through writing). The school at which I was employed at the time, Crawford College Sandton, was thoroughly accepting and embracing. My career got a second leg. My teaching became more relational, I was far more willing to teach diverse and challenging texts, and I enjoyed the willingness of my students to approach complex topics in class discussions and in their writing. My teaching was enlivened because I was finally living an authentic life and I could be more real and open and approachable in the classroom and in my interactions generally.

Many years later, some of those students have told me that my willingness to be so real back then made them feel safer in my classroom, that they could be themselves too.

But there was something more fundamental going on that the new success masked: my career had been chosen by a version of myself that no longer existed. As I embraced my identity as a gay man and my faith deconstructed entirely into a kind of joyous atheism, my identity as a teacher and educator started to feel worn. Eventually, it was threadbare.

Erosion

After I had taught for the best part of a decade, it apparently dawned on managers that my skills outside of the classroom, particularly in timetabling, were starting to position me on a management track – or at least that I could be used to supplement the workload of managers. I didn’t want to work towards being a deputy principal or any other kind of school leader, even at a low level, but I found myself coaxed in that direction. I accepted because career progression is alluring and, as I’ve repeated, teachers are supposed to go the extra mile. Slowly, my admin load started to include jobs well beyond my core responsibilities. I wasn’t skilled at negotiating my way out of this and I didn’t stand up for myself or draw boundaries when I needed to. And why would I? Teaching is a calling! You help out when you can!

So, I pivoted. I tried other schools, hoping to find better working conditions. Eventually, I found a post where I could specifically negotiate, from the outset, a core teaching role. It was theoretically the perfect position: teaching stripped of distraction and time to thrive in that space. I wanted to specialize as an academic professional. But I found two things quickly that jolted me into a reckoning. The first I’ll explain in Part II.

The second was that I realized, to my shock, that I just no longer loved teaching – or even enjoyed it. Once all the admin had been removed and my focus was back on the classroom, I found nothing left. The act of being in the room, of having students in front of me, of working with them, no longer gave me energy and life. It was draining, disempowering and demoralizing. This was exacerbated by a student body that was quite explicitly hostile to who I was and how I taught. I’d never encountered anything like it. Over time, until I felt unsafe and unmoored. Every class, every one, became something to dread, an expense of energy, of holding myself up for ridicule and hostility. The drain was too much. I’d get home every day and feel so tired that all I could do was watch hours of TV, mindlessly trying to recover the sense of self and life that I thought I had somewhere inside me. My health took a knock. My mental health was worse. It was too much. The payoffs – the teaching and the connections – no longer justified the delirium.

In retrospect, I think I outgrew the career years before I quit. The load increased progressively, the toll was exacted incrementally, but I persisted because it was all I knew, and getting through the trials was part of the gig, and the job did pay consistently, with decent benefits. But I realized that the career had turned on me. It wasn’t just that I had lost the love for the job – even though that love is so, so important to teachers – it was that I hated every aspect of it.

I think the reason for this is the construction of the career. It’s designed to extract service, caring and investment from teachers without the compensation and work environment that other careers may have. Certainly, the world of work isn’t supportive of employees, but teaching is a acutely constructed to work as long as its professionals love what they do so much that the costs are overcome. Once a teacher reaches the limit, the only solutions offered are soppy bromides in the staffroom. The career collapses easily.

I handed in my resignation early in the school year. It was a massive risk. I had little to fall back on. So, I spent a few months finishing a master’s degree in creative writing (was a total thrill and just the right focus after 11 years of teaching). And now, I’m a freelance writer, embracing an unstable income but one that feels far more reflective of my value and services. It’s a profession of utter creativity and artistry, and I can work to my own schedule and own my life. I don’t need to feel called to a vocation anymore, only to write well (which I do) and give my clients the words they need to express, market and position themselves. It’s creative, it’s all on me, and it’s where I need to be right now.