Last Year, I Quit My Teaching Job. I Thought I Would Miss It. I Don't.

Here's why.

Photo by MD Duran on Unsplash

Last year, I quit my teaching job.

I quit after my dean gave me a chocolate bar for a raise (as a joke), then denied me a remote teaching arrangement—even though I was already teaching online, and I offered to teach more courses for a lower salary.

It wasn’t the only reason.

Since then, I wondered if I would miss it. I wondered if I would ever find myself longing to return to the classroom.

I don’t.

First, I don’t miss giving up night after night and weekend after weekend planning lessons, grading papers, and answering emails.

I don’t miss endless department meetings where every single item gets kicked down the road to the next endless department meeting.

I don’t miss working my ass off June, July, and August doing professional development, independent studies, assessment, and curricular planning, only to hear my own family talk about how nice it must be to have summers off. I don’t miss giving up a Saturday morning for commencement.

I don’t miss paying out of pocket for journals, books, registrations, flights, and hotels, then having my reimbursements denied because HR started using a new form but didn’t update it on their website.

I don’t miss spending 9 months writing an article and waiting 6 months for it to get reviewed by a journal. I don’t miss one reader recommending publication, another recommending rejection, and the editor shrugging.

“Try again.”

I don’t miss journal databases charging libraries hundreds of dollars to read my articles and not paying me a single dime.

I don’t miss vice chancellors sneering at my CV because I didn’t get my doctorate from an Ivy League institution.

I don’t miss getting lectured on burnout by the dean who just canceled my course release for the extra service work I did.

I don’t miss getting called out by a vice chancellor in front of the entire university for finding ways to pay adjuncts extra money.

“That’s highly unethical.”

I don’t miss spending all weekend writing reports for department chairs who don’t read them and don’t respond to my emails.

I don’t miss having to grade anti-vaxxers “fairly” and “respect their views” while also being told it’s my job to teach information literacy and critical thinking. And I definitely don’t miss having to attend workshops on incorporating ethics into my curriculum while my university pays starvation wages to their staff and my chancellor drives a sports car worth more than my house.

I don’t miss wondering how I’m supposed to talk about human rights or civil rights or social justice when universities are banning medical masks, hosting disease minimizers, funding fossil fuels, shooting tear gas at nonviolent protestors, and accusing them of hate crimes.

I don’t miss department chairs who say students who make grammatical errors aren’t ready for college, or deans who say they could totally teach my course, but they won’t because it would be a poor use of their talent.

I don’t miss colleagues who tell me to stop worrying about adjuncts and their working conditions because it’s not important.

I don’t miss walking forms to three different offices on campus every time a student gets automatically dropped for not paying their tuition on time, because financial aid didn’t process their financial aid on time.

I don’t miss being called a fearmonger, a conspiracy theorist, and a doomer when I say Republicans really do want to end education.

You’re going to see a lot of “breaking news” about the end of education. But it’s not breaking news. For the last 5-10 years, teachers warned everyone this was going to happen. They warned everyone there was a massive exodus from the profession. They warned everyone there were dire teacher shortages.

Teachers warned everyone that letting Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and their legions of influencer goons talk trash about education while glorifying hustle culture would have really bad consequences.

Some of us even tried to warn everyone that letting a disabling, brain-damaging virus reinfect kids and their teachers over and over while talking about “learning loss” would have really bad consequences. We warned everyone that low pay, deplorable conditions, and impossible expectations were going to drive out all the best and brightest, making it easy to topple the whole thing.

I was a teacher, and I’m homeschooling my daughter because I know public education has become a tragicomedy. This country stood by and watched their schools become death traps. Sometimes, they protested. That protest energy never translated into the sustained action we needed to save education. Why did education die? In the end, I think it was just too boring for anyone to care about. So, this isn’t news at all for teachers. It’s ancient history.

Teachers begged for help, and what they got was judgment and ridicule, often from the ones who claimed to care the most about education.

How funny is that?

There’s nothing left to save. Anyone who cares about education now is going to have to rebuild it. For many of us, it’s too late. We gave everything we had, and it wasn’t enough. It’s your turn now. We’re done with this mess.

I would rather work at Chipotle than go back to teaching. I would rather work at Starbucks. I would rather mop floors. I’ve done that type of work. Teaching is the only job I would pay not to have to do ever again.

Did I say I don’t miss grading papers?

I don’t.