Teaching is a difficult job, and teachers deserve a pat on the back for the struggles they deal with day-to-day. Between long hours, savage students, and absurd administration, it’s no wonder why so many teachers resign! These teachers reveal the breaking point that caused them to say “goodbye” to teaching forever. Content has been edited for clarity.
“It Was Despicable To Not Stand Up For Your Most Vulnerable Students”
“I didn’t necessarily quit, but I would have, and this situation ultimately contributed to my decision to stop teaching.
I taught a class well-known for its ability to break even veteran teachers. The students were rowdy and disrespectful, and some students had very low standardized test scores. Granted, the start of my year was rough, I had trouble controlling them since it was my first year. But once I found a good behavior management system, things smoothed out.
However, I still had trouble with one particular student, but toward the end of the year she opened up to me about her struggles outside of school. All of the student’s test scores improved and their behavior improved, but it wasn’t enough. The principal only chose to focus on how the students behaved at the start of the school year and berated me for having such a terrible class.
The principal also thought less of me because I didn’t seek help from the teacher who taught the same class before me. This teacher in particular almost quit before the holidays because of the class, and all of my student’s parents told me they disliked the teacher. Why would I have wanted her help?
My coworker, who was also a first-year teacher, was given a similarly ‘bad’ class, but she had a violent student who would throw desks and chairs. The principal knew this, a still gave a first-year teacher this class instead of a more experienced teacher who taught the same grade.
My coworker ended up doing great things with her class and managed to improve the student’s grades and behavior. However, at the end of the school year, she found out her father was sick, and the school fired her.
The school couldn’t afford to increase the salary of first-year teachers going into their second year, so they fired all of us at the end of the year. Including me.
Before the end of the school year, the orchestra put on a concert. One of my students had a disability, and she enjoyed being in the orchestra and playing the violin. The orchestra teacher pushed against my student joining the class at the beginning of the year because the student ‘couldn’t be trusted with an instrument.’
Anyway, the student was excited about her first concert, and she came to school dressed up.
I knew she needed to be in the gym at 1:15 for her concert, so at 1:15 I asked the student, ‘Okay do you want to head down to the gym now?’
The student didn’t reply.
Some friends of the student knew she was in the orchestra and was excited to see her play, so they told her she needed to head down to the gym.
The student finally replied, ‘The orchestra teacher told me I couldn’t participate today.’
I was baffled, so I called the head of the special education program to ask if he knew anything about this, and he didn’t.
The orchestra director told my student she wasn’t allowed to play in the concert.
When I asked the orchestra teacher why, they replied, ‘Well, she doesn’t play very well and she can’t read music.’
I thought to myself, ‘Isn’t this the point of your entire job? To teach the students?’
For reference, it was an elementary school orchestra, not the symphony.
Although the head of the special education program and myself tried to get the student to go on and play, she was already thoroughly embarrassed and humiliated, and she didn’t want to anymore. Afterward, I filed every complaint in the book. However, the school didn’t care. They didn’t do anything.
I was so upset and ashamed. It was one thing to inconvenience your teachers, but it was despicable to not stand up for your most vulnerable students.”
“It Was One Of The Most Frustrating Things I Encountered”
“This situation was one of the most frustrating things I had encountered while working in a school.
I wasn’t a teacher, but I was a ‘classroom assistant’ hired by the county. Classroom assistants were more like volunteers who were paid in education grants. So, we made less than minimum wage, technically a little over two bucks per hour. There was a teacher in charge of us, I’ll call her, ‘Sandy.’
Sandy always had a lot of things to do, so I left her alone. I just kind of did my own thing by asking what teachers needed help day-to-day, showing up to Saturday school for tutoring, and doing whatever I could to help with school events. It was hard work.
I tutored every single class offered to students, reported abuse cases at children’s homes, and learned to level with and work with kids who had intellectual and behavioral issues. I didn’t receive any training for the job. It was hard. I also spent a lot of my own money on resources and supplies for students who needed them, probably more money than what I made in the first place.
But, despite all of those bad things, I put up with all of them. I did hundreds of hours of work for almost no pay, all because I legitimately cared about those students. It was a rough school and the students deserved to have a fighting chance. They deserved people who cared about them, structure, and someone who was willing to take the time to make sure they could be successful. I did it for them because somebody did it for me when I was little.
Then one day, Sandy asked me to be a substitute teacher for a class. I wasn’t allowed to substitute teach because I didn’t technically work for the school, which meant I couldn’t be alone with students. I also didn’t have substitute teaching certifications.
Sandy walked away angrily, then told several part-time teaching aids, ‘You all have to work overtime now, and it’s her fault! You all need to teach her a lesson!’
Sandy wrote down a list of things she didn’t like about me, mostly related to my appearance and clothes, and gave it to the teaching aids.
Then over the next two weeks, all of the teaching aids started calling me terrible names and mocking me. They did it in front of the students, too! Then Sandy started calling me those names, then some of the students started doing it because they saw a teacher doing it. My depression got worse. I went from insomnia due to stress, to insomnia due to stress and humiliation.
I had enough. I transferred to a different school for the remainder of my service term, and I just sat in an office and did nothing for the remainder of the year. I didn’t sign up again for the following year.
Honestly, working in the school scarred me for life.”
“All I Wanted Was For My Students To Succeed”
“As a teacher, I taught English. During my last semester, I had forty-eight students in my classroom on average. The classroom barely held enough desks for thirty students. The school only provided one textbook per three students. Plus, the students were not allowed to take the textbooks home. Needless to say, both I and the students were struggling.
I took pictures of my students working in the classroom and went to law firms begging for legal pads so my students could take notes. I went to banks and even my local credit union to beg for pens. I lived on macaroni and cheese and ramen during my first month of teaching because I bought all of my student’s copies of books and folders for their work.
I traveled to the English department of a nearby university and begged them to let me put up fliers pleading with students to donate copies of Shakespeare plays for my students. I shouldn’t have had to gather all of the resources my students needed. The school district should have helped.
I even almost ruined a twenty-year relationship with my best friend because I continued to beg for her to let me use her photocopy privileges with the university’s print shop for my students.
I tutored my students who were struggling outside of working hours, and I offered extra credit homework wherever I could. All I wanted was for my students to succeed and see I was truly trying to help them.
At the end of the year, nearly every one of my students passed the English portion of their state proficiency exams. Then, I had my end-of-the-year review with ‘Stacy,’ our school administrator. Stacy was not happy with my performance. While she was content with how my students performed on the state examinations, she felt troubled by my apparent ‘lack of effort’ and ‘lackadaisical commitment to my students.’
I could only assume this was her version of a pep talk.
After my ‘pep talk,’ I was done teaching. I finished out the last week of school, then I took all of my belongings home with me. I never went back. The students and administrators were shocked when I sent my letter of resignation over the summer.
The school administrators person assistant called me and said, ‘Stacy and I are both shocked you decided to move on.’
But in the event Stacy finds this, I just want her to know something. Yes, it was me who put those deep scratches all over your brand-new, sparkly BMW you bought yourself with your year-end bonus.
Just to show Stacy how proud of her I was, I dug down to the bare metal.”
The Poor Principal
“I had to move to a different school because my principal, ‘Becky,’ and I did not get along.
Everything started with Becky accusing me of missing too many days of school. I missed the first two weeks of the school year because I gave birth to my child in August, and it escalated to her accusing me of not having followed proper procedures for sick days when my son was hospitalized in December. I followed the correct procedures, including emailing a detailed lesson plan to six different employees, herself included. I never got an apology from Becky.
Becky consistently called me unprofessional. It got to the point where I asked another administrator if she could look up the number of days I had missed and compare them to other teachers. As it turned out, if you discounted the days from my two-week maternity leave, then I had missed less than the other teachers at the school.
Finally, Becky tried to pull some sort of a ‘your missed school day came too close to the end of the school year and broke the contract’ lie when I had a doctor’s appointment for my child in May of the school year. I hadn’t missed a day of work since January, except for jury duty. By this point, I had found a position at a different school, so I insisted a representative be present at all dealings with Becky from there until the end of the school year.
This is all without mentioning the other issues going on throughout the school year. A group of six students ran a substance dealing ring out of their lockers, multiple students threatened different teachers, and there was a persistent in-school truancy problem. We had students throwing chairs out of a second-story window. It got worse after I left, too.
And yet, I probably could have dealt with everything if the administrators had been even remotely competent. For me, it was never the kids who made me want to quit teaching. It has always been the administration. The principal Becky was the worst of them.
I work at a different school now, and it’s like night and day.”
“I Was Just As Nauseous As The Children”
“This situation wasn’t the sole reason I left teaching, but a part of it.
I worked as a preschool teacher. In my state, you had teams of two or three teachers per classroom. I was asked by my director to switch from one district to another. The move included a pay raise, and the new district was only ten minutes away from my house. I had just found out I was pregnant, and being closer to home seemed like a good idea.
Naturally, I took the opportunity and switched districts. The older co-teacher in my class wasn’t great, to say the least. She was mean to the children, and she thought I was an idiot because my degree was in early childhood education and hers was in elementary education.
When I told my co-teacher I was pregnant, she said, ‘Why would you tell us now? Something could happen to the baby this early on.’
When I did end up having issues early in my pregnancy, my co-teacher wouldn’t let me leave the room to answer my doctor’s phone call. Though months later when she cracked a tooth, she immediately left to call her dentist.
One day, my co-teacher asked me, ‘Are you wearing deodorant today?’
I was wearing deodorant, but she continued to say, ‘I’ll open a window in here so you won’t get sweaty, anyway.’
She made a disgusted face and implied I smelled. When the boiler system went crazy and the heat cranked to almost eighty-five degrees, my co-teacher refused to open a window until our secretary walked and saw me overheating on the floor. Since I was pregnant, it was a medical emergency.
Another time, we fed our kids hot spaghetti and loaded them all up on a bus to visit a dairy farm for a field trip. It was a ninety-degree day, and one of the children got sick and threw up. The co-teacher made me walk him back and forth around the farm until his mom came to pick him up. I was six and a half months pregnant, miserable, and just as nauseous as the children.
The co-teacher kept a detailed record of my behavior and shared it with my boss.
She told my boss, ‘She is grumpy, and never talks to us at breakfast,’ and other untrue things.
When we went on summer break, we knew funding would be up in the air for the next year. Lay-offs were expected. I was laid off right after I gave birth to my son. By the time my job was available again, my husband got a decent raise at work and we could afford for me to stay at home. So I did.
The other co-teacher went through about half a dozen other co-teachers in eight years. Nobody wanted to work with her.
For reference, none of us teach anymore. The co-teacher made all of our lives miserable.”
“I Went Home Seething”
“I taught for four years. My department head had a personal vendetta against me for some unknown reason. She never liked me or my teaching style. I was twenty-three years old, and she was sixty years old. I guessed we had a lot of differences. I spent three years of my teaching career just confronting the department head’s problems head-on and trying to be kind to her. I tried to brush everything off as much as I could.
I also didn’t like teaching. I liked working with the children and I did my work well, but deep down, I loathed every second I spent in a classroom. I thought the career was for me, but the administration ruined it.
The final straw was when I spoke to the headmaster about taking time off to get married. Where I lived, I was entitled to a set amount of vacation time when I got married.
In the middle of the conversation, the department head busted into the office and just lingered around listening to our conversation. Her behavior was weird, but this woman was always wacky, so I didn’t care.
All of the sudden, the department head chimed in and started talking about how I wasn’t entitled to the time off, as I wasn’t getting married in a spiritual center, and the law only really applied to weddings in a spiritual center. The department head researched the law on her phone and started making a major deal about why I shouldn’t get any time off for my marriage.
Long story short, the headmaster read the law and agreed my situation didn’t apply to getting time off.
I went home seething. I loved my students and I put in the best quality work I could, but I hated teaching. The other staff members at the school constantly put me down, gossiped, and found any way to make my life harder. My anxiety was insanely high for years, my hair was falling out, and I just reached my breaking point. I wasn’t happy, and I was never going to be happy teaching.
The next day, I called out sick. The same Friday, I marched into the headmaster’s office with the dean of students, filed an official complaint against the department head detailing each moment she harassed me, and gave them my resignation letter.
The department head ended up getting fired one year before her retirement due to my complaint. Four years later, I don’t have any regrets.”
“I Couldn’t Deal With It Anymore”
“One time, I had a severe ear infection and temporarily lost my hearing for three days.
I tried to push through the pain on the first day but realized shortly after how not being able to hear the numerous nine-year-olds in my classroom made teaching them extremely difficult.
I took two days off of work, and I sent a highly detailed plan to the substitute teacher who was covering for me. This was the only time I took off work throughout the entire year. I was an extremely reliable teacher, and taking off work wasn’t a decision I took lightly. However, it was necessary at this time.
I returned to work when I was feeling better with no less than ten complaints from the kids’ parents. They claimed my sick leave was ‘incredibly selfish,’ as having a different teacher for two days was ‘very confusing’ for the kids, who allegedly couldn’t cope.
The headteacher at the school backed me up and told everyone upset with me to calm down, but it was very much still the last straw. I bent over backward working weekends and evenings for these parents’ children, but they couldn’t afford me a little bit of human decency.
I left teaching afterward. I couldn’t deal with it anymore.”
Student Teacher Struggles
“Before I started permanently teaching at my school, I already couldn’t stand the gossipy nature of the teachers in the lounge where I student taught.
Half of the teachers I worked with acted like they were juniors and seniors in high school. The ‘real world experience’ I gathered from the past decade gave me work environments to compare teaching to, and it was crazy how different these teachers’ professional lives were.
At my first teaching site, I taught students choral education. I had a parent aggressively come at me about her son not being given the stage blocking and spotlight she thought he deserved, as if I was the actual teacher who made this decision. At this point, I was only a student teacher. If I could have made more decisions in the classroom, I would have.
The parent was pretty upset when I replied with something to the effect of, ‘I don’t care if your son ly Justin Timberlake, I’m not going to just put up with you cursing and yelling in my face. If you think this is going to help your kid, you’re sorely mistaken.’
The next morning, I had a fun meeting with the parent and the principal. Thankfully, the principal backed me up. However, the parent said she was pulling her kid out of choir because of the situation.
When I checked last week, the student was still in choir class. The throwdown happened two months ago.”
“It Was Endless”
“I left teaching when the state I worked in mandated a new teacher evaluation protocol.
We had to document our teaching proficiency in four standards, seventeen indicators, and twenty-nine elements with photographs, examples of student work, handouts from meetings, logs of parent interactions, and copies of emails.
Nobody has ever expected a doctor to have to ‘prove’ they related well with his patients by photographing an office visit. But for whatever reason, I had to photograph students working in the lab or doing group work to ‘prove’ I taught using a variety of techniques.
I had to log or photograph my visits to my students’ study hall to ‘prove’ I supported their learning. It was endless. Administrators still visited my classroom and evaluated my teaching as before, but now I was responsible for documenting so much more. If the state couldn’t trust me to be a professional after fifteen years of teaching advanced placement classes then guess what? I was gone.”
Missing The Mark
“A friend of mine quit on the spot when he was asked to change a student’s grade.
The student missed over fifty percent of his classes, never handed in homework, did poorly on tests, and ended up failing the class. In my opinion, the student truly earned his failing grade.
Since the student’s father was an influential member of the school board and a generous donor to the school, administrators ‘couldn’t’ allow the student to have a failing grade on his record.
Summer classes were also not an option because the family had already scheduled a vacation during the time those classes would be in session. So, the principal told my buddy he had to change the student’s grade to a passing grade.
My buddy told the principal he would not sign off on it, and if it was so important to him, to change the grade himself.
My buddy then said, ‘If you change the grade, don’t expect to see me working here in September.’
Sure enough, the grade was changed, and my buddy packed up his things and left.”
