The Hired Guns Blog

Happy Friday! Today brings the debut of “Miss Education,” a public-school teacher in the New York area. Until she finds herself a shiny new career and can leave the blackboard jungle behind, she’ll be posting anonymously. We think her struggle to drastically remodel her work life is something that lots of us can relate to . . . .
After four years teaching, I’ve had enough. In fact, I often wonder why I stuck with it for the first four days. In 2007, I graduated with a diploma in one hand, a teaching license in the other, and stars in my eyes. I had just one goal: to change the world through the power of literature and my dynamic, witty personality. I didn’t know which school would hire me, which grade I would teach, or even which city I would work in, but somewhere, my first class of middle-school students was gearing up to have the best English teacher of their lives.

Four years later, after working for the New York City Department of Education, I am also working at a second job on the sly, enhancing my resume with other marketable skills and counting down until the day I can quit teaching middle school forever and shred my license into confetti.

I think that I went into teaching for all of the right reasons. None of the perks–summers off, pensions, health benefits, a workday ending at 3:00 p.m.—meant anything to me when I began my secondary-education program at college. I cared about only two things. I wanted to spend most of my day with eager, energetic young people, and I wanted to talk about books ALL DAY LONG. Was there a better way to make a living?

As it turns out, yes, yes there is. There are much, much better ways to make a living than working where you have to worry about kids trampling you in the hallways without so much as a second glance; where students feel free to curse you out because you remind them to hang up their coats; where you get caught in the middle of students fighting each other and get injured in the process; where your complex, interesting, lesson plans are met with blank stares; and where the administrators tell you that all these problems are your fault because you’re not motivating your students enough.

The problems lasted for four years. For the first three, I gritted my teeth and pushed through, convinced that if I just stuck with the job, I would eventually discover the rewards of teaching. Every June I told myself, “It will get better. It will get better.” It never got better. Even then, I convinced myself to stick with it just a little longer.

I think people stick with bad jobs for the same reason they stay in bad relationships: no one wants to believe that their efforts were a waste of time. People want to believe that the time they spent getting their bachelor’s and master’s degrees, going on interviews, and learning the “tricks of the trade” will lead to rich and rewarding careers, just like a woman might believe that the guy in his thirties who still lives in his mother’s basement and believes his band can still make it big will finally get a real job and pop the question. And even after the epiphany hits–that job is never going to get better, the guy’s going to be living in mom’s basement forever–people still stay where they are because of guilt and a well-meaning but misplaced sense of duty. “I can’t quit this job/break up with him; they really need me!”

I reached the “it’s not getting better” point somewhere through my second year of teaching, but only after my third year did I finally overcome the guilt. I knew I wanted better. It was knowing that I deserved better that gave me the push I needed to finally leave.

Right now, I’m still in my teaching job. I go in every day, do the best I can, and leave at 3:00 to go to my other job (the one that I like). I made a commitment to stay until the end of the school year. The struggles are the same, but I’m much happier, because I see the light at the end of the tunnel—even though the traffic remains very thick.

[Photo: Paul Hart/flickr]