Why teachers quit
It’s my 13th year. My third school. My 5th principal. My third district.
And when I look down the barrel of 20+ more years of this, I want to die.
I love my kids. They refuse to work. I’m supposed to make them, but they aren’t held accountable. I’m supposed to make every accommodation, exception, and differentiation to help the succeed. And when they still don’t do the work, it’s still my fault. I have to give them a second, third, fourth, fifth, ad naseum infinitum chance to redo, retake, resubmit, retry, etc etc etc.
When they ask, “What can I do to improve my grade”, I have to point to all those 0’s in the grade book for work that wasn’t even attempted. They still look at me like there is some magic answer they haven’t been given by me—any answer but the one I give them which is “Do your work!”
And that’s literally only 1/100th of the problems I had to deal with today x all 140 of my students. And when parents complain, I have to take time away from my planning to tell them exactly what looking at the grade book ever could have told them, and then I’m suppose to come up with some miracle to solve the problem and when I CAN’T, the admins will just go over my head if the parent complains hard enough and make me give the kid credit for doing nothing so they can pass anyway.
I love my kids. I spend hours and hours crafting lessons that are fun and interactive that I then cannot do because they refuse to be quiet long enough to understand what we are doing or they simply don’t do any of the work required of them to even be able to do the fun stuff.
Then I sit in traffic for over an hour trying to get home where I’m too tired to do any of the things that keep me healthy and sane. And I need those things. Because after my hour long commute back in the morning, I’ll inevitably have a few emails from disgruntled parents demanding this and that from me.
And all of this for such little pay and no respect.
This is why teachers quit.
