![construction paper card from a student that reads "Congrats Mrs. L on dealing with my BS threw out the year! I really appricate you and everything you do! Keep doing you and I'll always remember to invite you to my harvard graduation!" construction paper card from a student that reads "Congrats Mrs. L on dealing with my BS threw out the year! I really appricate you and everything you do! Keep doing you and I'll always remember to invite you to my harvard graduation!"](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F29bd9aa5-5f4c-4ccc-b0fc-ddce9e224192_4032x3024.jpeg)
As a teacher, you learn to expect a lot of freedom. For better or for worse. Freedom to experiment with how a class is run—swapping content order, trying a new assignment, flipping the classroom—it’s a stage and you’re the director. You are also free to have students with needs far beyond what you can provide. Free to decide whose learning experience suffers: those with or without high needs, because it’s usually one of them. You are free to grasp at straws when a student misses your class 3 out of 5 days in a week and administration shrugs their shoulders because at least he’s not disrupting the class when he’s gone.
Teaching’s a highly varied field. Mileage varies, but there’s not always much oversight. When there’s not much oversight, you get used to not meeting with your bosses one-on-one that frequently. If you do, it’s highly specific and related directly to a recent class you’ve taught, and your opportunities to improve. Teaching’s a feedback-heavy profession. If the feedback isn’t happening 1:1, it’s happening in group settings, during PDs, or from parents. It can be difficult to know whose opinion matters, so you might default to the least-crazy parents and your direct supervisor. [fn: of course, if you work in a wealthy school district, this experience might be completely foreign to you. tbh babe if that’s you, stay where you are and ride that wave till you wanna retire.]
Corporate America, if you haven’t made the jump yet, will probably be quite a bit more structured. Patterns are probably going to carry over a bit more from job to job. You’ll probably see your boss one-on-one every week for half an hour, or maybe every other week for 45 minutes, plus a longer performance review once or twice a year. You’ll have regular immediate-team meetings, somewhat larger-team meetings, entire staff meetings, and the odd random meeting you get invited to for no discernible reason.
It will probably feel like less freedom at first. If you haven’t had a corporate manger yet, this number of touch points might feel like micromanaging. You’ll need to get better at documenting the work that you do. It may not feel like more work than teaching. Depending on what you jump into after teaching, corporate America may even feel like less work at times. But what’s gonna increase is documentation of the tasks you perform. It will become important to know exactly how many fingers you have in different pies, how deep they are in the pies, and what flavor the pies are.
No problem, you’ll tell yourself. Kids have looked me dead in the eyes and called me a bitch before. Kids have spent days on end commenting exactly on what I smell like, and have insisted on playing overly vulgar songs out of their phones while I’m trying to talk in the middle of class. I’ve juggled a lot in my past career, and now I need to stop juggling the balls and put them into organized boxes. This is not nearly as difficult, and I am adaptable, you will say.
You’ll be right. In your teaching days, your brain made room for lots of tiny compartments that hold different ideas and projects and tasks. It turns out, when you write down all of those compartments instead, on an asana board and daily in a work journal, you double the amount of space that you have in your mind to get.shit.done. You’ll use these little written tools every time your boss wants to meet and get updates. They’ll be handy every time performance review season rolls around. Taming chaos as a teacher will translate very well to organizing corporate chaos, and your diligence will make you a high performer.
It will start to feel like second nature, filling out your work journal at the end of each day. Asking yourself what you’re proud of, what you did today, and what you need to do tomorrow will feel like a helpful capstone and organizing tool. You’ll thrive on the routine. You used to live and die by the school calendar, and now you’ll do so by the fiscal year.
You’ll start to look forward to meeting with your boss for 1:1s. You’ve generally been lucky and had good-natured bosses who act in good faith. You’ll return the favor. Actively seeking and giving feedback about how things are going will create a virtuous cycle. Both of you will want the other one to have a generally good experience at work. Not necessarily because you really care that much about KPIs and revenue targets, though you care a little because it means you still have a job if the company hits them. But you’ll care about feedback and playing well with others because you want to enjoy your day to day at work, and caring is generally contagious.
You won’t always like everything that the big cheeses at work do or say. That’s not a big deal, you’ll tell yourself. You didn’t like everything your principals and program directors did or said. If you need to get your feelings out about it, you’ll find a diplomatic way to word it and bring it up to your boss, or maybe a friend who doesn’t work at your company. A strategically placed bitch and moan is your right on this green earth, and you’ll take it.
And then, one day you’ll blink, and corporate America will have been part of your career path for the better part of four years. That will start to feel quite meaty, like you’ve properly transitioned careers. Like your first job or two in the private sector weren’t actually flukes, and you can stay here for the rest of your working years if you want to.
Part of you will get wistful for your teaching days. You’ll forget how often you came home from school crying. You’ll forget how hopeless it felt watching black boys and white boys misbehave in identical ways, but the white boys always got guidance counselors and the black boys always got juvie. You’ll forget how much repeating the same directions twelve times in a row numbed your mind and made you want to scream.
This much time away from teaching will settle some rose colored glasses firmly on the bridge of your nose, and you’ll miss it. The dizzying pace that toddlers in your preschool class acquired language every year. The steady maturation of 8th graders from shortsighted preteens to curious young adults in your middle school class. The effusive enthusiasm of 3rd graders learning about reptiles in your after school club.
You’ll miss it. And you’ll be grateful that you left. The clash of those two seemingly opposite emotions may stir something up in you occasionally. Maybe you’ll dwell on it, maybe you won’t. Either way, you’ll head back to your corporate job on Monday. You’re the director of your life, and this is only Act Two.
This is for my girls who left teaching for corporate life. Thanks for reading. As always—if you like my writing, please heart the posts & subscribe. See you next week.
“threw out the year”
I hope you weren’t her English teacher lol