Since 2004, I have had the same fall responsibilities: lesson planning, classroom prep, staff orientation, lesson planning, student open house, lesson planning, first day jitters, introductions, lesson planning, grading, and exhaustion. Then more lesson planning. At least, those were my fall responsibilities.

As I like to say these days, I’m a “recovering English teacher,” and those old responsibilities now only manifest themselves as symbolic phantom limbs. And, as a former K-12 teacher now standing on the outside looking in, I have a few teaching observations I’d like to share from this new vantage point:

• The daily grind of K-12 instruction is an impossible work requirement that is only accomplished because teachers have no other choice. Having taught for 14 years, I slowly developed the ability to babysit, instruct, lesson plan, grade, discipline, and record keep concurrently for 7 hours a day. Teachers do that because they have to. But that doesn’t stop it from being too much to ask of any professional. It’s shocking to me that more teachers don’t burn out.
• Regular jobs are SO quiet! My only previous work experience was being surrounded by two dozen teenagers all day long. Noise was par for the course. Working in an office, exclusively with other adults (even adults who regularly celebrate putt-putt achievements just outside my door), is impossibly quiet by comparison. It’s almost alien.
• Teachers don’t have enough time to collaborate. One of the reasons I left teaching is because despite loving, appreciating, and respecting my colleagues, I never really worked with them. I’ve always wanted to collaborate more with professionals working to improve institutional best practices, and teaching has surprisingly little of that. In my current position at NMC, collaboration is a daily occurrence, and the practice is incredibly valuable. K-12 teachers have a tiny amount of collaborative time by comparison, and students and schools are ill-served by it.
• Every day in the classroom is professionally rewarding. There are a lot of things about teaching I don’t miss, but one I do is the inherent reward of working and helping students every day. Even a bad day teaching involves a half dozen or more moments when a teacher’s impact is felt. While professional colleagues are more open with praise than students (good luck getting a 15-year-old to thank you for teaching them about thesis statements!), days can go by in the “real” working world without a similar sense of accomplishment. Every day in the classroom is full of them.

There is no profession like teaching. I often tell people that former teachers are strange artifacts: we have developed the skills to do do anything, but are qualified to do almost nothing. That fact is a great illustration of why it’s such a unique and difficult job in the first place.