My husband is practically killing himself working 2 jobs because it’s not really safe for me to go back to teaching high school. Especially, now that I’ve been recently diagnosed with asthma and have been recently hospitalized from my first asthma attack).
As a senior developer he’s able to work remotely easily and make more in one week as a part time contractor than I could make in an entire month as a teacher. But because we have a large family and a significant amount of student loan debt we really need two incomes consistently to make ends meet. His taking on the second gig made sense at the time was supposed to be temporary.
He’s been doing this for three years now and it’s really starting to take a toll on his mental and physical health because he works really long days and usually only takes one day out of the weekend off. I even recently took the little kids to visit family for a few days to give him some quiet time because he really struggles with interruptions and the babies can get loud. He feels like he’s missing out on spending quality time with the kids because all he does is work and if he doesn’t make some time for himself to game or something he struggles with his patience. Go s
Covid isn’t the primary reason I left education but it’s the reason I haven’t gone back. Education is one the few professions that require you to be an expert in your field before stepping foot in the classroom, expects you to pay for and pass a series of state developed tests in addition to your degree to prove you’re capable of teaching.
It requires continuous education and professional development every single year, and that’s just the big stuff outside of the school.
I couldn’t handle the micromanagement from 6 different bosses. I had the principal, the assistant principal, the reading specialist, my team leader, SPED Caseworkers and my department chair to answer to. And to top it off I made very little money. Hell before I got remarried despite being college educated and working full time I was on food stamps and could barely afford my rent.
I used to stay that if 100% of my job was teaching my students that I would do it forever. But that’s not the case. Part of my job involved data science (student performance tracking to determine the efficacy of my curriculum), curriculum development (because of political bullshit and the state had NO approved state standards for backup),
I had a ton of administrative work, therapist, babysitter, social worker, & etc. I can’t tell you how many homeless students, pregnant students, hungry students, students who worked to help their undocumented parents pay bills, that I had to be there for and I didn’t actually mind that part of it other than it hurts the heart when you want to be able to do more but can’t. So when you add the micromanagement of shit that doesn’t matter much compared to the actual needs of students it was just too much especially since at the time I was also working against undiagnosed and thus untreated adhd.
They even took away my planning period when a teacher left mid year and gave me an extra class period on top of nearly doubling my class sizes for every period because they couldn’t find a replacement teacher.
At one point I had more students than chairs.
So after finishing my graduate degree in English with a concentration in Composition and Rhetoric I decided to leave hoping to get into editing or communications. I thought having presented published works at conferences, a stable work history and a graduate degree would make me a good candidate. Boy was I wrong.
After about 3+ years of attempting a career change I started to wonder if I pigeonholed myself to only be qualified to teach English. I’ve applied for thousands of jobs across various fields because you’d think that the skills of an educator would be transferable to many careers.
I’ve even used my time to teach myself new skills. I’ve received a google scholarship to do a front end web development program, I’ve dabbled in programming languages like C#, python, and GoLang (though at a very limited/beginner level) and yet I get at least one rejection email daily from a variety of fields. The most frustrating of which are the rejections for the proofreading and assistant editor positions I’ve been applying for now that I’m near Chicago.
Not to play the female card but sometimes I wonder if my resume had a man’s name if I’d have as many rejections as I’ve had. I get that I have a long gap now but I’ve filled that time in with freelancer on my resume which isn’t a lie. I’ve done lots of side gigs here and there but made very little from it.
I just find it soooooo frustrating to see all these articles about a worker shortage and how people are refusing to work, yet I’ve applied for thousands of jobs all around the US and even outside of the US (more out of wishful thinking lol) because we can live anywhere since my husband works remotely full time. Also, I cant help but be frustrated by my husband being a self taught developer with no degree because he didn’t finish (he wishes he did) and the sky is the limit for him but I’m lucky to make over 33,000 (my salary as a teacher in Oklahoma) with over 6 years in college and 3 degrees under my belt. Don’t get me wrong I fully appreciate the time and hard work he puts in and it’s not him that I’m frustrated with. It’s the whole damn system.
I really just wish that I could find something that wouldn’t require my husband to work a
second job out of necessity rather than out of choice and at his leisure to get ahead and have savings or so we can do a family vacation which we’ve never been able to do.
I’m sorry for the length of this post I just needed to vent a little bit. I don’t know why I’m not a good candidate for anything but it’s starting to get a bit depressing because it’s making me wonder what the hell is wrong with me.. especially since I’ve had my resume reviewed by professional services and have done everything that’s been suggested to get call backs. My husband has also tweaked it to highlight some of my tech stuff as well.
I even message recruiters and managers at the companies I apply to on LinkedIn to introduce myself and let them know I’ve submitted a resume just so I can be in their radar. But now LinkedIn has made that more difficult unless you pay for a premium membership…aarrrrggghh.
I better stop now before I keep ranting.