Teacher Quit Teaching Because She Loved Her Students Too Much
Sometimes, the educators who love their job the most are the ones who struggle the hardest.
PeopleImages | Shutterstock Teacher Isabel Brown loved her job, and she especially loved her students, but she still had to leave the profession. It's a tale as old as time nowadays. Teachers are overworked, underpaid, and they are underserved by their communities and administrators.
There have been countless stories of teachers in America quitting their jobs in recent years. The Wall Street Journal reported that approximately 300,000 public school teachers left their jobs between February 2020 and May 2022. Additionally, McKinsey research found that, in a survey of U.S. educators, school leaders, and school mental health professionals, one-third of respondents indicated that they planned to leave their professions.
A teacher shared why she quit teaching to become a student advocate.
Isabel shared a video on TikTok explaining why she quit teaching to work in advocacy. It certainly wasn't because she didn't love her students. In fact, it was because she loved them too much.
While she worked as a teacher, Isabel loved interacting with her students and refused to give up on any of them, doing her best to make her classroom a safe space. However, after six years of teaching, she felt that she had become overburdened, serving as both a teacher and a therapist to her students.
Despite loving teaching, Isabel quit her job to help students one-on-one through advocacy, as well as to take better care of herself. In her video, she spoke about how she loved teaching freshmen students and watching them grow. She would develop friendships with some of her students as they went through school, and cultivated a “safe space” by “never giving up on the ‘bad’ student,” taking students who “hated everything and everyone” and giving them “opportunity after opportunity” to grow, complimenting and engaging them in her classroom.
The teacher said that the burden of being 'a therapist alongside a teacher' became too much for her.
After her students left her class, though, Isabel described having to “watch their spirits be crushed” throughout the rest of their time in high school.
“It could be from issues at home, it could be friendship issues… it could be their other teachers, it could be school or the school system in general,” Isabel explained, “but after six years of trying my hardest and smiling and pushing through, I realized I cannot change the school system.”
Isabel said that it made her feel “useless” when she wasn’t able to help her students and that she “couldn’t keep watching the freshman have their creativity and uniqueness crushed.”
This feeling led her to create her own advocacy business, Brown Crayon Advocacy, where she now provides one-on-one services to help students, parents, and teachers with educational issues. As an advocacy coach, Isabel is now able to spend more time taking care of herself and her family.
The comments on Isabel’s TikTok were largely supportive, including appreciative messages from some of her former students. Other comments included students and parents expressing their gratitude for caring teachers like Isabel. Many other commenters, like Isabel, were former educators who had similar experiences with the school system. “‘We can’t find good teachers!!!!’ THIS IS WHY!! The good ones leave [because] we can’t continue!” one user said.
Teachers are already stretched thin when it comes to job expectations, and students are suffering for it.
Media_Photos | Shutterstock
Teachers today wear many more hats than simply being educators. As Isabel herself experienced, teachers are forced to act as surrogate parents, therapists, and, in many cases, protectors. According to the Pew Research Center, depression is on the rise among teenagers, especially young girls. Federal data has also shown that suicide rates for teens between the ages of 15 and 19 increased by 76% between 2007 and 2017.
Experts have pointed the finger at everything from social media and school violence to cyber-bullying as reasons for the mental health crisis that only seems to be growing among young people. Unfortunately, teachers bear the brunt of this, and in most cases aren't equipped to handle or help these students.
Veteran teachers Joseph Tadros and Genelle Faulkner explained, "The roles of schools and teachers have grown over time. From teaching and learning to nutrition to mental health to digital access and more, schools are essential to communities and a catch-all when it comes to child development and wellness. While we believe it is essential for schools to play this role, the solution cannot be simply to add more and more responsibilities to teachers’ shoulders until they can no longer carry the weight."
But what's the solution? According to Tadros and Faulkner, support staff who specialize in student needs, as well as better pay for teachers. That sounds simple enough, unfortunately, schools are barely running on the funds they currently have. So, instead of students thriving and excited about the future, kids are grade levels behind, and teachers are burned out.
Jessica Bracken is a writer living in Davis, California. She covers topics related to culture, human interest, and relationships.
