It Is Time to Share My Story

At the start of the summer in 2022, I left my job as a public school teacher. I’m finally ready to share my story about why I made this choice. I probably should have written this as my first blog post in September, but I don’t think I was ready yet. Now I am, so here goes….

If you didn’t already know this about me, I am a former elementary educator. I taught in both public and charter schools for over 20 years in California, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. 

I enjoyed my job. 

I loved my colleagues. 

I adored my students. 

A few years before COVID-19 hit our world, I had a little buzz in my brain telling me that it was time for me to make a shift in my world of teaching. But I was scared. Teaching in a classroom was all I knew and the only career path I’d have in my lifetime. I felt it was my calling and I still think it was….for the time that I held that position, anyway.

In August of 2020, right in the heart of the COVID pandemic, my family moved to New Zealand for my husband’s job. I was fresh off teaching my students virtually, never really seeing them in person to say goodbye and I was exhausted. Like most educators, and people for that matter, I didn’t know what hit me. 

My family knew about 4 years prior that we would be moving to New Zealand and despite what was happening in the rest of the world, I took a year’s leave of absence from the classroom, packed up my family, and left! We spent nine glorious months in Aotearoa, essentially living in freedom, while the rest of my friends and family worked, taught, and lived behind masks and plexiglass shields. We were lucky.

But I was lucky in more ways than just dodging a pandemic bullet. The year away from my classroom gave me clarity on exactly what I wanted to accomplish as an educator.

When we came home from the other side of the world, I decided to return to the classroom for the 2021-2022 school year. It didn’t take me long. By October, my husband found me one day. I formed a ball on our bed, tears streaming down my face. He asked what was wrong and I told him that life was too short for this. I didn’t belong in a classroom anymore…that I still loved kids, which was why I was still doing this job. But I wanted to teach kids in a different way. I had different ideas. It was my husband that first encouraged me to make a change that would be not only better for me, but better for the children I worked with, and maybe even our community. He inspired me to see that this change could work!

Throughout that school year, I worked behind the scenes on my newly forming vision of my career. After school hours, I update my resume, which I hadn’t done in over a decade. I joined LinkedIn, which was something that felt very foreign to me. And I started to research and apply for jobs around education and SEL. 

When that school year ended, some say I retired but I didn’t file any formal paperwork for that and I think I’m too young to use that word. Sometimes I get asked if I resigned, but to me that implies that I quit teaching, with isn’t true. I don’t think I resigned, quit, or retired. I think I made a shift to a different kind of education for kids called Social Emotional Learning, or as they say in the business, “SEL”.

SEL isn’t new. It is something I think I have been doing with my students everyday in the classroom for years. SEL is teaching kids how to be part of a community, interact with others, love themselves, value their learning, and thrive. 

Especially after the COVID-19 pandemic and with the increase in pressure for teachers to close gaps and increase test scores, it didn’t take me long after leaving the classroom to set up Calm Education, LLC . My business is designed to help children, their families and their teachers with social emotional learning. I love the change of pace, making my own schedule, designing my own lessons, working with students and educators in a smaller environment, and directly seeing the fruits of my labor. 

I am often asked if I miss working as a classroom teacher. I think that is like asking me if I miss being in college. Of course I miss so many things about it…the social interactions, the fun, the rewards, the learning! But it is a thing of the past for me. I was ready to move on. I hit a point in my career when I knew that a public school classroom wasn’t the place for me anymore. I knew that my talents were ready to be presented in a new way. Nature was telling me that it was time, and I listened.

I am so privileged that I was able to make this shift in my career. My husband’s job funded our family enough that we could take the pay cut while I worked toward setting up this new business…for a little while anyway. There are many times when I continue to question, How am I going to make ends meet?

Many of educators tell me that they would like to do something similar but don’t have the means to take the leap. They often use the phrase, “I feel stuck.” Does this resonate with some of my educator friends out there? Are you feeling what some call “burn out” from education? 

I am going to urge you to rephrase that thinking. Instead of saying you feel “stuck” or “burnt out,” perhaps you can say….this is where you are meant to be. The universe, nature, or whatever higher power you believe in, is telling you that teaching children in a school, in a classroom, is where you belong. I know I sound cliche here, but perhaps you are a “chosen one.” You are a strong educator. If we didn’t have you, who else would do it? 

I think I speak for many parents when I say that I am grateful there are teachers still in the classroom, teaching our children. Our children rely on our educators. Our children will always need someone like classroom teachers to guide them, make an impression on them, and inspire them. 

I wish that I had someone that gave me better guidance when I started teaching. I had no idea the pressures that I would feel, the worries that I would hold, and the stress that I would be under. There were many times that I had difficulty dealing with all the emotions that teachers in a classroom feel everyday. As a result, I didn’t always take the best care of myself. Sometimes I look back at my first few years of teaching and wonder how I was able to stay with it. This is why I host Calm Education wellness workshops for educators and staff….to help them manage their emotions in such a demanding career.

Feel free to trash or treasure this unsolicited advice I have for all of you out there working in the world of education....

If you are wondering how you are going to stick with being a teacher, molding impressionable young minds…..think back to your WHY. Why did you become a teacher in the first place? Really think about that for a little while. Sleep on it. Meditate on it. Walk with this question. Once you know the answer to this question, you will know how you will stay with being an educator.

When thinking about shifting my career, I reflected and meditated on this question quite often. Why did I go into teaching in the first place? 

It is because I love kids. 

I loved being a kid. 

I love hanging out with kids. 

When I was younger, my summer jobs consisted of teaching kids how to swim and how to sail. It wasn’t until I taught a little boy with Autism how to swim that I knew I wanted to teach kids for my life. Honestly? I wanted to save the world! 

Looking back on it, I realize now that saving the world was a bit of a lofty goal. I could only take one school year, one classroom, and one student at a time to see what I could do to inspire them. Throughout my years, I felt joy when I stood in front of the classroom. I loved staying up late, putting together craft supplies for a project. I enjoyed turning my classroom into a pseudo-beach in the warmer months at the start of my career when I taught summer school. I couldn’t wait to begin a new unit and try out new ideas and lessons. It lit me up to see students admire their own growth. There was no other career that could do that for me.

Throughout the second half of my career, I started to see a change in schools and the way I was teaching. I began to resent the weekends and late nights that I had to spend correcting. I didn’t have time to put together fun craft supplies for my students. With health mandates, fear of intruders, and fire codes, I wasn’t always able to turn my classroom into fun places to learn. New units usually meant new curriculum materials and they began to fly at me at an overwhelming rate. I wasn’t able to be creative and write my own lessons because with new curriculum materials came robotic teacher scripts that I had to figure out how to make my own. When I looked at my students in my last few years of teaching, especially across a computer screen through the pandemic, I didn’t see the spark that I used to be able to ignite in my students. And I realized that was because my own spark was starting to dim.

Finally leaving my job as a public school classroom teacher for over 20 years was really hard to do. I had to go back to my WHY so many times. 

Why do I want to be a teacher? 

Because I love kids. 

I love helping kids. 

I love being around kids. 

I wanted to continue to love teaching, nurturing and being around kids. The classroom was suffocating me, making it really challenging to give children the love they deserved from their classroom teacher. This is why I decided to make the shift. 

I am forever grateful that I can continue to help children and their families. I’m using what I know about learning, development, and teaching to continue to mold, inspire, and help kids see their potential!

I am often asked, “How are things now that you’re not teaching?” And I am quick to respond, “I still teach, just in a different way.” I still identify as an educator. That is one thing about me that I know will never change….