Twelve Powerful Reasons to Continue Teaching: Why Educators Make a Daily Impact

Every moment, lesson, and student matters.

All photos by author. One of many classroom bulletin boards featuring students’ writing.

In the coming months, teachers across the United States will be offered their contracts for the next school year, and many will not sign them.

Despite the economic rollercoaster we are all riding, teachers are leaving the security of their jobs.

I think about leaving too…almost daily.

When a student whom I asked to turn around and stop copying her classwork from another student responded with, “You’re annoying the sh*@ out of me,” I thought about leaving.

Each time teachers are not consulted on changes directly impacting instruction, I think about leaving.

When I spend my “spring break” grading papers, I think about leaving.

In October, the teacher across the hall left. She had come to teaching from another career and had been teaching for two years. Two years had been enough. Our department was left with an opening that couldn’t be filled now that the school year had started and because of the shortage of teachers. After a long-term substitute teacher covered her classes for the fall, other teachers (including me) absorbed her classes for the spring, doubling our work. Again, I thought…