I Quit Teaching Mid Year - Was it the right choice? 

WHAT TO DO BEFORE YOU QUIT TEACHING 👉ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-uBaGENxE3wI.html

You did the right thing. Everything you mentioned points to bad parenting and zero admin support. I am retired Air Force (32 years) and have a Masters in curriculum and instruction. I sub in Southern California and experience students wanting to go to in school detention, only want to disrupt others, and wait for the teacher to "draw the line" so they can cross it and show their friends how cool they are. I will only sub 2-3 days a week.

I'm giving a 2 week notice next week. My kids would ask to go to ISS too. It's like they hate the lesson plans & books and I am the recipient of their hate.

I'm retiring after 25 years in LA county. I'm done. This is gonna be the longest 10 weeks of my life.

Just listening to you here, it's obvious that you are a neat storyteller. Thank you for sharing. If you are ever in central Illinois, I'll buy you a beer.

The pep talk at the end was lovely! Thanks for sharing.

Lot's of brand new teachers at a school is never a good sign. I had to laugh at your copy paper/copier story. In my city, schools here have the same issue. Being able to get the paper, and make enough copies (copy counters in the copier software and the passwords) is always an issue. It's a constant battle. I've listened to a lot of quitting teaching stories and yours is one of my favorites. I enjoyed your final comments about what amazing people good school teachers are and how many useful skills they have that make them well suited for all sorts of jobs. It's the truth.

You are far from alone in your (wise) decision. More and more teachers are leaving midway through school years, or even at/toward the very beginning- and even less than a few short months before the ends of years as well! The job is simply too stressful, unpredictable, horribly paid, and ungrateful in the eyes of other academic parties on and off school grounds. ANYTHING, ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING can happen at the drop of a hat at any point in a given school year regardless of what month it is on the calendar. One doesn't need to be in a profession where their life is at risk minute-by-minute. If and when you feel like the job is not worth it, feel free to hang it up. There should never be any guilt on any teachers' parts for leaving when they do. You did your part while others badly failed to do theirs in return.

Sounds like my first year of teaching in an inner city charter school 🥲 sorry you had to go through this.

Amazing video

A thankless job and the culture within schools has to be seen to be believed. I am writing this in Australia.

Uniform checker! Wohhhhh!

I've been praying about what I should do as far as teaching as well. I am not fully licensed at this point and am only one task away from obtaining my full professional license. The problem is that I have only 26 days remaining before I need to take and pass my Praxis exam, for the scores to be sent to the state, and have my account processed and updated. The even bigger problem is that the state is extremely backed up and is only in the month of September as far as processing license even though we are in February. If I do not meet these deadlines before March 18th then I will be out of a job, but I am also somewhat relieved because as you have said, the stress is insane. I have been working in the type of environment that you were in until you quit and went to the new school for almost five years now. What sucks is that all of this is happening two and a half months shy of my 5th year mark which is a huge milestone for teachers both professionally and financially. I have chosen to leave it all in God's hands and will hopefully be at peace with whatever the outcome is. I would really love it if I could finish out this school year though. You definitely made the right decision!

Yup - your stories are NUTS but you really never know what you are getting into when taking a public education job. Your video speaks to the GREAT importance of teacher candidates interviewing their potential bosses during the interview - not just the other way around. I would definitely be asking what the curriculum is, what materials are available, what the school's teaching, learning, and discipline policies are, and so forth.

I accepted a job guiding wilderness canoe trips at a youth camp up in northern Ontario as I had already qualified as a guide at a then defunct camp and had already paddled some 3,000 miles including all the way up to Hudson’s Bay. I had the eleven and twelve year olds which is problematic because then you have to have a staff member in each canoe paddling stern. Unfortunately the staffman and the guide are the only two actual counselors so you have to have sixteen year old CITs paddling stern on two or three of the other canoes even though at that age they should really still be campers going on the Hudson Bay trip to qualify as guides. You guessed it, my problem wasn’t with the kids so much as with the CITs who would cause problems by being rebellious and incompetent. Typically they would paddle too fast naturally to show off, but then they tended to suck at carrying loads on portages. And if you had to holler at one of the little kids for doing something stupid like climbing up on a decaying 100 year old log chute at a Victorian era logging operation neglected since the ‘forties or so, they would try to take the side of the stupid little kids over and against the word of the young adult staffman who was an actual school teacher. I had to demand a conference with the camp owner, an Air National Guard fighter pilot who was independently wealthy hence his ownership of this forty acre island with a one hundred year old canoeing camp on the site of an ancient Indian village. The incompetent and spoiled Canadian CIT broke down crying during the conference. It became evident that I wasn’t going to be able to get rid of him even though a perfectly well adjusted 21 year old man had been let go and actually picked up by a bush plane out on a trip to get rid of him, for god knows what cause. If I had to relive that experience I would’ve quit and demanded pickup by the DeHavilland Beaver float plane to go retrieve my car and drive home early. But I relented and finished off the season. Big mistake. While teaching school the following year it became evident that I needed to start graduate school so canoe camp was out, especially for $100 a week for a 24 hour per day job with no day off for seven weeks. While teaching school I twice quit mid year. My experience at the canoe camp had fortified me to resist putting up with nonsense. To be fair most of the sixteen and seventeen year old CITs were useless. But even the camp director admitted that this one guy was spoiled. He had a number of obnoxious habits such as singing Anglican hymns such as JERUSALEM while paddling. I liked Jerusalem better at Denholm Elliot’s funeral at the end of the movie about a Singaporean bordello entitled SAINT JACK. Or listening to it while getting stoned with 10,000 other people at the 1972 Emerson, Lake & Palmer concert at Cleveland Public Hall.

I teach ESL and also only have 30-minute classes (8 groups daily K-5th grades) and I have to pick them up and drop them off since they are in elementary school. So I really only have 25 minutes of instructional time. It is not enough time!!

You aren't alone

Good for you ! I have 3 years and can’t wait. Teachers are martyrs and captive because we all love the job-we don’t need to be motivated but yet admin unmotivates us because they have to justify their huge salary for doing very Lo=ittlem

I left mid term. I got a job working for a major company. Living alone in NYC, I just couldn't afford the rent anymore on a Catholic school 🏫 salary. You should be allowed to tell the students that you are leaving! They need to say goodbye and some want to write ✍🏽 thank you cards and give gifts 🎁...

Were you in Peoria Illinois?

Oh my, this is almost EXACTLY my experience this year.

I find it devastating teachers are having this experience. Im a cpa, and my professors were life changing. Were in trouble as a society. 20 years from now the kids that will be adults are going to be incapable of doing the most basic jobs. This is a sign of some deep societal issues.

I left one private school after five days. I left even before the students arrived. Upon arrival, I was instructed to deliver a pre-packaged Spanish program of instruction. Spanish 2 and 3 were from a textbook. Spanish 4 began with a full week of "sexual identity" which began with a video of a man who stated that he could not decide if he was a man or a woman. The second week was about why heritage speakers of Spanish need to support "Black Lives Matter". I told the school that they would have to find someone else. I came to the school to teach Spanish and the school was off track. It was a hard decision but it was the right thing to do. (The school had a 26% teacher turn over from 2021 to the start of 2022)

I "taught" math in a school in Jersey City ... my son had an apartment 2 blocks away and could not get in his apart three times due to police / crime scene tape blocking the entrance which was through a bodega downstairs. A kid in my school held a broken, ceramic, sharp cup shard to other students throats ... He was not only NOT removed, but the admin didn't even take the shard away ... That was nowhere near the worst thing that happened in the year I spent in hell.

I’m going through this now

What state were you in? Was this a charter school? The behavior issues were not your fault.

what are you doing now for living what is your job now

Do you speak more than 2 languages? You said multilingual.😊

We have to supply ALL of our own paper. Bizarre.

30 minutes? That is crazy 🤪. Whose idea was that? I teach 6 classes of sophomore English. It is a lot of work.

Yep sounds like the average experience at ghetto schools. I wouldn’t wish working at one on my worst enemy.

I find that most "I quit" videos come from middle school teachers, which begs the question. Why do we have middle schools? Why do we need to isolate the eleven to thirteen-year-olds? There are two phases of youth that I find the most irritating, because I remember what it was like being in those phases: The first is toddlerhood. Yes, toddlers are adorable, but they are also incredibly annoying and irritating. Then again, it's a confusing time for a child. They are no longer allowed to get away with the things that they were allowed to get away with as infants. They're constantly being told they are "big" now, but at the same time, they're not being taken as seriously as the age group we classify as "children". That leads to a lot of behavioral issues that need to be corrected. That childhood phase is generally a happy time. You get a good few years to be innocent. Adults aren't taking you as seriously as you wish they would, but you kind of know where you stand as a child. Then you (universal you, not personal) hit the adolescent years. Now, you have been exposed to all kinds of media, you have heard all kinds of stories from babysitters, older relatives, etc., and you can't wait to make a name for yourself in high school. However, before you go to high school, you need to go through the dreaded rite of passage known as middle school if you were in the American public school system. You have heard horror stories. You have been threatened by other kids that in middle school, they'll beat the crap out of you or shove you in your locker. Your friends have advised you to toughen up, because middle school was going to be a warzone. You have been told that the teachers just don't care whether you live or die (which is bullshit, all my middle school teachers seemed like they wanted us to succeed). Meanwhile, it's like you're a toddler all over again. Your body is going through rapid changes, you're starting to notice the opposite sex (or same if that's your thing), and you're just confused as to how to act on these changes. Meanwhile, just like when you were a toddler, you're suddenly too old to do this, too old to do that, yet you're not being taken as seriously as the teenagers. Those behavioral issues displayed by toddlers take a whole new mutated shape. On my first day of seventh grade, back in 1999, I joking asked my first-period history teacher who's angry at her, because in our minds, back then, nobody went to college to become a teacher to teach middle school, you either wanted elementary or high school. Elementary-age children and teenagers share one thing in common: they know where they currently stand in life. They may not like it, they may not agree, they may complain about it, but in the end, they accept that this is the way things are. My teacher laughed at that. However, it doesn't need to be that way. Many private schools here and public schools in many other countries don't have middle schools, they have primary and secondary schools. The way they separate the grades varies from system to system. While there are still behavioral issues, there's nothing a kid, no matter what the age, despises more than being seen as immature or not age-appropriate. If the school has those "middle" kids in primary school, they are going to be seen by the little ones as the big kids and would feel, even without a gentle coaxing from the faculty, to be a good example for the little ones to follow. During lunch period, a kindergartener would look in awe at the eighth grade tables and some would smile back as if to say, "Yeah, I remember when I sat at your table. Before you know it, you will sit here and wonder where the time went." On the other hand, if those "middle" kids are placed in secondary school, and be around all those big, tall, "mature" high schoolers, you'd be inspired to mature up faster, or else you'll be dismissed as a "stupid little kid" by the teenagers. I never hear about behavioral issues in schools that use one of those two systems. However, we are still taking kids at a confusing period of their lives and isolating them from their younger or older peers. Even worse, we are conditioning them to be afraid of starting middle school. I think it's a terrible disservice to the education system, the teaching staff, and most of all, to the students. What are your thoughts?

That was then. This is now. In 2024 in my state- they’ll pursue getting your license pulled for anything less than 60 days. Teacher shortages have consequences.

bro was teaching in gotham

You probably know this now, that was a “pipeline to prison” school. They are managed on the idea most of the students will end up in prison and are conditioned not to function in a college or a job but as a good prisoner. What you taught didn’t matter because these schools are designed to destroy the future of children. They are never expected to learn anything, but to be institutionalized in some way for life. This is institutionalization orientation. The intentional rule breaking for in-school is how prison and jail works. Do a certain thing, go to a certain place, because it’s how you get to be near friends and lovers. For example I worked as a teacher in a hospital and many of my kids in jail or on schools like these staged suicide attempts on certain dates to meet up with friends at the hospital. It’s also the only degree of agency they have over their lives. A major part of the behavior problems is that the kids know and understand this. In fact it’s all they’ve ever known so they understand the culture better than the teachers. And why behave anyway if the expectation and ultimate goal is jail?

Those poor kids tho. everyone leaving and giving up on them and no one fighting the admin for a positive change 😢

Sounds like culture shock. You must've never worked at a Title 1 school before.

Listening to your story puts me in a disheartening position for you and most importantly the students. The situation you have explained is evident that the students you speak of are minority students. They are living in an ongoing environment that tells them at a very young age that they aren't important and worthy of a valuable education. 30 minute class lessons and once a week for some of them?! It's so sad! It sounds like a pipeline to prison if you ask me. No talking in the hallways and checking uniforms. This is really, really disheartening! There are really no winners here. You were not in a caring and supportive environment for students as well as teachers and the students get reinforcement that they don't matter.

You really should have stayed and finished the year.

I walked out at the end of a 2nd period class and never looked back. I said I had an emergency and called in sick for the next two weeks and then quit for good once my paid days were gone.

So why do we need to pray about it? Especially if we’re nonbelievers? Doesn’t make much sense to me