Swimming Upstream: Why I Decided to Go Into Teaching When Everyone Seems to Be Headed Out

You’ve probably read the headlines. Teachers fleeing the classroom at a record pace. Teachers are deflated, defeated, over-worked, and under-paid. There is an ongoing teacher shortage everywhere, and nobody wants to fill it.

You’ve no doubt also heard about round after round of tech layoffs over the last couple of years, flooding the market with extremely qualified people, all vying for an increasingly small number of positions, made all the more difficult by the skyrocketing evolution of AI, making leaders believe that it can replace a lot of roles.

Phew. That’s a lot. Being a job searcher out here is no fun.

As a person who loves learning, I’ve spent my career in the education space, but even so, I never thought becoming a teacher would be my path. I started instead working in textbooks, before transitioning to EdTech, where I’ve worked for over a decade. I liked knowing I was helping people learn, and I liked the fast pace of the tech world, getting to work on new and different projects every few months.

But another thing a lot of you who have worked in tech know – the burnout is real. When it became time for me to look for a new role, I started with EdTech companies, and I applied to a lot. But there wasn’t one single one that made me excited. I needed a job, I needed to make money. But the fire and passion I’d had earlier in my career was absolutely gone.

Over the course of six months or so, I applied to over 400 jobs in tech, but I can’t really say that my heart was in any of them. I tried my best, but when I made it to final round interviews, I would feel myself filling with dread rather than hope. I knew I needed to go in a different direction, but I had no idea what that was, and as time ticked on and my savings shrunk, I felt at a loss.

Then I got a cold. The first cold I’d had since before the pandemic, and the worst I could remember. As a result, I was forced to basically stay in bed and do nothing for a week. I didn’t have the energy to do anything – work on the freelance jobs I was doing to pay the bills, search for applications, work on the online classes I was taking to upskill. It all ground to a halt.

Thank goodness for that cold.

Once I was forced to stop doing a million different things and just be, my brain started to process more, and I was actually able to think about what I wanted with a clear head (and stuffy nose). I realized that all that dread I was feeling was because I thought no matter how great a company or product or team was, going back to work in the same type of environment was just going to lead to burnout all over again, and that feeling was my body’s way of warning me not to go down that road.

So I finally started widening my job search, thinking about the things that I did want, what would make me happy. I remembered my childhood dreams of owning a bookstore, a dream that was promptly quashed when I worked at a bookstore to put myself through graduate school. While retail was not, in fact, the life I was destined for, the other part of that daydream was – a life filled with books. I had gotten two degrees in literature and started out in publishing before jumping into the EdTech fray. Just the idea of returning to a life where I could spend more time reading immediately sent my heart fluttering, and some of the dread lifted.

So what else? I have also been a lifelong advocate of education for all and believe deeply that access to equitable and quality education should be a right, not a privilege. That was the motivation for my move to EdTech, and even though I didn’t want to stay in that field, that passion was still there. I’ve always worked better and been happier when doing something I cared about, even if a day, a week, or a month was really hard.

In my previous role I had worked on dozens of pieces about the teacher shortage as well as content to help those studying to become teachers. I knew there were a lot of opportunities in teaching, and more importantly, I would be going into it with my eyes wide open. It also helped that during my time off I had built a successful content strategy consulting business that would help offset the fact that teacher salaries aren’t exactly competitive.

An English teacher. How cool would that be?

I thought about the teachers I know in my life, and the idea of being like them made me smile. One of my kindergarten teachers, who still teaches some classes at 102. A family friend who always asks me what I am reading and wants to hear all about it. An uncle and a cousin who would literally go to the ends of the earth for their students. That’s the company I want to keep.

I am not na?ve. I know this is not the easiest path I’ve chosen to take, but it’s the most excited I’ve been about my career in a very, very long time. Next month I start my teacher residency, and one year from now I will be a fully credentialed English teacher in the state of California. So, this is me, going in.

I’m taking the leap.