Why I Left Teaching

An American Tale

It was 2016 at 10:13 a.m. on a Tuesday in November. In the basement of a fairly prominent public high school, I was sitting criss-cross applesauce underneath the desk in my shared office in hiding.

I was working in a hybrid administrative/ teaching role as an academic advisor/instructor for a cohort of about 40 high school students who were all enrolled in in/outpatient therapies. Some were on parole. One of them, at that moment in time, was armed, angry, and loose in the building.

And I knew why.

Knowing why is a dangerous thing. I remember holding my phone in my lap and deciding against texting my husband. My babies, too little to contact. They know I love them, I thought. I was grateful for my OCD tendency that compelled me to remind them every day.

I was there on grant funding. When my boss brought me into her office in June to gently break the news that funding was not renewed for the following year, I cried. I cried because my income was needed and I was still in a graduate program that required field hours. But there was also relief. I could still taste the fear at the back of my throat like the smell of mildew in that basement office. I didn’t even pack my things in the cardboard box they gave me, emptied of printer paper. I left everything there except the haunting notion that I might never feel safe in a classroom again.

I tried to start over elsewhere. I prepared myself for the endless lockdown drills. I practiced in empty classrooms. I surveyed the courtyard just outside my windows. Too open. Too few places to hide. I adjusted seating arrangements for minimal exposure. I made sure to never fill my closets with supplies in the event they had to be filled with bodies. Once, a “drill” was not announced as such. There wasn’t a moment’s hesitation as I flung my own body in front of the window in my door to pull the shade down and use my arms to shield the half-terrified, half-indifferent freshmen huddled on the floor behind my desk. Some on their phones with their mothers. Some on Tik Tok.

I already knew if it came to that, it would not be a choice I would make myself but a visceral response I would not be able to control. I would, always and without hesitation, sacrifice myself to protect those in my care. Leaving my own babies without a mother.

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If we’re really honest with ourselves, this is what our society and the policies we support expect of teachers, isn’t it?

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I carried that deep knowing throughout the close to four years that followed until the pandemic brought out a whole different set of reasons why it was downright deadly to be a teacher.

Poetry is my inner dialogue. I write my calendar in iambic pentameter for fun. I asked my students what they were going to do with their one wild and precious life and cared deeply about their answers. I tutored college essays like they were the next great American novel- a short-form memoir! A masterpiece.

I wanted to hold Odysseus’s cloak-disguised self in my hands and on the pages and not live out the Hero’s Journey in real-time. I wanted to point to Macbeth and say, “See? See what happens when a good man is consumed by hatred, greed, jealousy, and comparison? I wanted to see every beating heart and convince them to pour out their thoughts onto empty pages that could hold every feeling that felt too much. English class was life class- you could read and write about anything!- my tagline.

I was a high school English teacher. And a damn good one.

I left New Jersey public schools in 2021. I left for a multitude of reasons ( though I remain deeply involved in education and the well-being of students, teachers, and administrators in my current role) but this was the first domino. I would die to save my students. As guns are being handed to students by their parents, by their friends, and allowed by their government, I would be expected to sacrifice my own life and my children their mother as a necessary martyrdom for the right to bear the kind of arms that could wipe out a classroom of first graders in the time it takes to pour a cup of coffee.

There have been more than 385 mass shootings across the US so far this year. I put my babies on a bus and have to temper my own prayers and good thoughts about their safety and those who are in charge of their care. I do not care your party leaning or line, if you are alive, you are political- either benefitting or suffering from the policies that exist.

I’m not the only one whose exit from public education was initiated by the widespread gun violence that plagues our nation. I will not be the last.

Either by leaving the profession they love, or becoming another name in a headline we will ignore.