For Good

I was a teacher for ten years and it never really felt totally right. For most of my career, I was waiting for it all to click, for the conditions to improve, for the support to be given, for the current I was swimming against to slow. For a time, I thought it did. Teaching can be a bit like a drug: incredible highs but dangerous for your health. Those highs came from the relationships – with students and colleagues alike – and they kept me going.

In July, I gave it one last push. I attended Litdrive’s National Conference with two dear colleagues and I was so inspired by the speakers and by the ideas they shared. I wanted it to work.

When I got my timetable for the new school year, I knew I was done. I just couldn’t face another year of teaching students who show open contempt for the subject I love. When I handed in my notice in October, I was struck for the first time with an intense regret at having ever trained as a teacher at all. I had this overwhelming sense that I had thrown away my last ten viable years as a woman about to head into (peri)menopausal dystopia. I had caused my family endless stress and not an insignificant student loan for a career that didn’t work. I was feeling very low.

Leaving in December was strangely anticlimactic. It felt like a normal end-of-term. Except it wasn’t. Christmas was a relaxed and enjoyable affair. Gone was the undertow of dread. Gone was the guilt of not working enough in the holidays. Gone were all the pre-term nerves. I was lighter, happier, a new person.

When everyone was going back to work in January, I was giddy with relief.

After a brief period of frenzied job-hunting / soul-searching, I was able to secure some freelance work which is so perfect for me, it feels like it is kismet. I am doing some work on communications and member engagement for Litdrive, the same English subject association and charity that put on the inspiring conference. It is an organisation that aims to help English teachers achieve better balance through quality resources, CPD, and mentoring. Not only am I making use of all my years of blogging and social media tinkering, but I am also using my English teaching experience. I have no idea where this will all lead but for now, I am excited about work, feeling like a Proper Living Person for the first time in a long time.

Unrelated sidenote: Did anyone else do that stupid thing when you were a kid where you asked someone if they were a PLP? If they said yes, you proclaimed them a Public Leaning Post (and proceeded to lean on them). If they said no, you bemoaned that they weren’t, in that case, a Proper Living Person. There was no way to cheat the ‘game’. Infuriating.

Anyway, back to my new normal. I miss my colleagues terribly and have a certain amount of survivor’s guilt for having escaped. I miss the kids too, some of the time at least, and still enjoy it when they say hello to me in the mornings when I am doing the school run. It sounds so final to say I have left teaching for good but that is definitely how it feels. I have left for my own good.