Editor’s note: All student names have been changed.
You take a deep breath and stare at the 20 pairs of eyes in front of you.
“I’ve had a lot of tough conversations recently,” you say. “But this is the one I’ve been dreading the most.”
Your students, quiet now, shift uneasily in their seats.
“There’s no easy way to say this, guys, so I’m just—”
“Oh no,” Ryan groans.
“I’m just going to jump right to it: I got a new job as a writer for a running website and will be leaving Koontz at the end of February—”
Brittany gasps. George sighs. April wears an expression of intense worry.
“—which means you’ll have a new teacher for the last little bit of the year.”
Your words hang as heavy as the Florida air around your first classroom eight years ago. Most of your students sit in shocked silence.
Finally Sarah breaks it.
“Congratulations!” she yells, on her way to tears. “I’m so happy for you but so sad for us!”
Ryan yells, “How could you do this to us?”
You stare at the ground. You knew the question was coming but it still stings.
“Let me explain everything first, and then I promise — I promise — I’ll answer any more questions you have.”
Your students accept that answer.
“The first and most important thing for you to know — if you take nothing else away from this — is that it has absolutely nothing, zero percent, to do with you guys. In fact, you guys, and the students I had before you, are the only reason I’ve been a teacher for this long. Talking with Eric about UF football and UNC basketball. Calling Brooke ‘tater diggers.’”
You get the class laughing at that one.
“Those are the things that I’ll remember, those are the things that matter. I love Math and Science, you guys know that, but the things I’ll remember from being a teacher, the things I’ll take with me forever, are those.”
Some of them begin to cry.
For the rest of your speech, which you had rehearsed on runs for weeks, you explain to them how the job is draining you, how you are barely home with your family, most days leaving the house before your daughters awake and getting back after they’ve gone to bed. “I feel like I’m missing them grow up,” you tell them, and your students nod through their red eyes. “They, more than anything, are the reason I’m leaving.”
You are equal parts grateful and inspired by their response.
“Do you know if the new teacher will be nice?” Lucy asks.
“I’m sure they will be,” you try to assure her.
Some had broken out into full sobs now. You’re surprised you’re not crying; maybe the relief of getting it off your chest is stronger than the sadness.
“I’m going to miss you all like crazy. And I guess I’ll finish off by saying the most important thing: I love you guys and am excited for this final month together.”
You give instructions for them to pack up as you pass out the letter explaining everything to their parents. Among the chaos of kids packing up, of April sobbing and her friends rushing over with red-eyed hugs, of kids running around the room and yelling frantically, of chairs clattering and the walls seeming to shake, of the blur of one of those defining moments in your life, you catch Jayden’s eye as you hand him the letter.
“Family first, Mr. Harms,” he says simply.
You smile at this 11-year-old’s wisdom as you fight back your own tears. “That’s right,” you tell him, walking to another table. “That’s right.”
It’s been more than three months since the day I told my students I was leaving, probably the toughest thing I’d ever had to do as a teacher, and it still seems like some surreal combination of a dream and nightmare, like it never happened and that on Monday I’ll see them all again and they’ll tell me about their weekends and we’ll do the Question of the Day for our Math warm-up.
I’ve experienced the entire spectrum of human emotion since that day, from intense sadness and guilt about leaving to anger and resentment toward a system that puts thousands of teachers in similar situations. I’ve thought, and think, about it too much, too deeply, too often. Even three months later, removed from school and all of the emotion it brings, I’m still not sure if it was the right decision.
On a Tuesday night in January, I broke down. My wife, Carly, was at book club, her well-deserved once-a-month escape from the rush of evening parenting, and my mother-in-law stayed late, making dinner and watching our two young daughters so I could finish a tutoring session. I got home just before 8, scarfed down some tacos, and began the bedtime routine.
Mayla, our 4-year-old, went to sleep fine, but Rory, who’s now 2, was having trouble sleeping then. I held her, rocking her in the big gray chair, for a half-hour or so, hoping she would fall asleep in my arms and I could put her in bed. She was restless, though, and seemed no closer to sleep than she had before I turned the lights off. It was close to 9 now. Knowing it wasn’t going to go well, I put her in her crib, sang a couple of songs to her, and left the room. She started screaming before I shut the door.
I went back in and tried it all over again: rocking her, singing to her, holding her. She kept wriggling around in my arms, fighting sleep like a champ. It was 9:30 now. My frustration mounted: I still needed to shower and make lunch and pack clothes for the next day and I wanted to be asleep by 10. By then, though, I knew it’d be a small miracle if Rory was asleep by 10, let alone me.
I sat there, in the dark of my not-yet-2-year-old daughter’s room, and stewed. Doesn’t she know that I have to be up at 5 to run before school because I have to tutor after school till 5:30 and Carly is going to yoga at 6 and I need to meet her there to pick up the girls and drive them home and make dinner and eat and go to bed so we can do this all again the next day? Doesn’t she know how busy I am? I don’t have time for this.
That last thought — I don’t have time for this — is the one that, days and weeks and months later, ate at me, and maybe the one that pushed me to find a different job. How could I not have time to help my daughter fall asleep? How could I have spent hours away from her that day and then be wishing for nothing more than to leave her? A toddler not sleeping is frustrating, yes, but what she needed that night was a patient dad who could soothe her, hold her, be there for her.
It struck me then with startling, unsettling clarity that I was not that dad.
I don’t remember how Rory eventually got to sleep that night. She always does, and now she falls asleep on her own in her crib with very minimal help, which only makes my frustration more embarrassing.
What I remember was going to bed angry that night, mostly with myself but also misdirected at Carly and Rory, and waking up feeling the same way. I was probably short with my students that morning, too, and likely went through the motions of teaching with little joy or energy. I was disillusioned, exhausted, and mad at the world. For the first time in my life as a husband and dad, the two roles I consider most important, I started to see meaningful gaps between what I strove to be and what I was becoming.
That was one night, yes, but many others were like it: I’d get home after dinner, maybe joylessly read a book or two to Mayla and Rory, help them get to bed, and then get ready for the next day. My friends affectionately called it “monk life.” I remember thinking that there was a reason monks didn’t have kids.
I knew something had to change, that my current pace of work was unsustainable and maybe even unhealthy. I was running 50-plus miles a week, mostly in the cold dark in an upscale shopping plaza in the mornings before school, teaching every day from 7:30 to 3, and tutoring most nights from 3:30 to 7:30. On Monday nights I had another session from 8 to 10. My fifth graders could do the math: Most days I was spending 10-plus hours with other people’s kids and less than one with my own.
Every 15-minute increment of my day was planned, scripted, inalterable. On some nights I remember feeling that eating dinner was a chore. If something small changed my schedule in the slightest way — maybe a 2-year-old having trouble sleeping — I felt like everything collapsed. I was an inflexible zombie with no time or energy for anything other than what the day had prescribed.
I write none of this to portray myself as some kind of hero dad who grinds for his family. In fact, I think it’s the opposite: I was kind of an idiot for believing I could do everything and still prioritize what mattered to me. The past eight months have humbled me significantly.
So I was left with a few options: The first was to continue my current pace until I officially exhausted everything I had; I’d call that the stupid choice. The next was to cut back on tutoring and try to be home more often, which was financially challenging.
And the last option was the one I didn’t want to face: find a new job that allows me to be around more — and leave teaching.
All three options kind of sucked. I didn’t want to fully burn out; I didn’t want to turn away tutoring clients because that business is the reason I was able to remain a teacher in the first place; and I didn’t want to leave teaching before the school year was over.
It forced me to examine my priorities more closely than I ever had. What mattered to me more than anything else?
The answer to that question starts and ends with the three girls/women in our house, and maybe it was as simple as that. If I could find something that allowed me to be a better, more present dad and husband and still help support them financially, then perhaps it was a no-brainer and this essay is 2,000 words too long and all of this analysis is melodramatic and unnecessary. (It’s probably still too long and melodramatic and unnecessary.)
But teaching is one of those select few careers that muddles that calculus, that makes those seemingly simple decisions agonizingly difficult. If I were pondering leaving a career in insurance sales or advertising, I’d have had no second thoughts. But teaching. But teaching.
I knew that my decision would affect far more than me, of course, and my family. I knew that it’d affect, probably in a negative way, the 40-plus young people whom I saw every day, that they’d be disappointed and sad and not have the years of being jaded by the world to shape their understanding. All they’d know is that someone they relied on was leaving them. That hurt, and still does.
And that feeling, more than anything, led to maybe my most important epiphany from this entire thing: All of this is wildly unfair to teachers. Three months ago I stood at the front of my classroom, alone, trying to explain something that I — and the thousands of other teachers leaving North Carolina public schools — shouldn’t have had to. It was me, not the secretary of education, telling my students that I legitimately, deeply cared about that I was leaving them. It was me, not a state representative who took away master’s pay for teachers, attempting to explain how I couldn’t be a teacher and raise a family in the way I’d always hoped. It was me, not anyone who helped create this entirely avoidable reality, facing their disappointment and questions and anger. I was alone. Teachers are alone, fighting a fight they can’t and won’t win because the country’s priorities are somewhere else. Their only recourse is to marry rich or leave, find something more lucrative but less fulfilling while trying to ignore the hole it leaves inside of them. And there is something deeply sad about that.
Carly, also a public-school employee, and I don’t live beyond our means. We eat out once a week and our idea of a luxurious vacation is staying at my parents’ house in suburban central Florida and taking the girls to the beach. And yet, if we relied solely on our two combined educator salaries, we’d be living paycheck to paycheck. We’d save no money for ourselves or our girls, and God forbid an accident or emergency. It made clear a sobering reality: We could not raise and support a family on two public-school employee salaries.
I realized this basically as soon as Mayla was born four-plus years ago, and that’s why I was spending most afternoons and evenings teaching high schoolers how to take the SAT. For whatever reason, the market said that doing test prep was almost four times more valuable than teaching fifth grade, an economic quirk I’m equally puzzled by and grateful for. There came a time, too, when some of these students wanted me to meet with them during school hours, and I’d invariably respond, I’m sorry, I can’t. I’m a teacher… For the first time, I had to turn away a student because they could only meet during these hours. Teaching, it seemed like, was getting in the way of making actual money. A business that I first started simply so I could keep teaching had become something more, and it seemed stupid to not pursue it.
The question, then, changed from Should I leave teaching? to When am I going to leave teaching?
This is the question that caused, and causes, me the most pain, and the one that I’m not sure I answered correctly. I could have stuck it out. I could have, and maybe should have, cut down on test prep, maybe even dialed back running. I could have stayed for three more months and spared myself and my students a lot of emotional turbulence. A growing part of me wishes I chose to do that, especially as the end of the school year approaches and the mountains turn green. A growing part of me wishes that I could do over these three months.
But I was exhausted and bitter and it was the dead of winter. These spring days seemed so far away. Mayla and Rory were only getting older. I knew that I wouldn’t cut back on test prep as much as I needed to because I knew that beyond June it was going to become my primary source of income. I knew I wouldn’t dial back running because that was the only thing holding me together. I knew that delaying the start to a new career would make me anxious. I knew that I would look out the window during long meetings at school and wonder why I wasn’t outside, wonder if I missed my chance to leave again. I knew that I would get home after dark one night and break down again, another day gone without seeing the two kids who matter to me more than anyone else. I knew that in 10 years, when they’re teenagers, I’d regret not spending as much time as I could with them, even if it was only three months. I knew that I had to leave.
I had long conversations with Carly, my parents, my sister, my friends, my pastor. All of them said some version of the same truth: You have to do what’s best for your girls. Carly, who is much smarter and more well-adjusted than I am, told me that just because something is hard to do doesn’t mean it’s wrong, that sadness does not automatically equal something bad. She reminded me that life is about choices, primarily about how to spend your time and who to spend your time with, and that every decision as a parent comes with some level of guilt. It’s up to us how to apportion that guilt. My pastor told me that there’s no shame in choosing your family over your career. My friend Jordan reminded me that just because what I’d be doing as a career wouldn’t be as personally fulfilling, the extra time with Mayla and Rory would equal or surpass it in importance. My dad, a former fifth grade teacher and lifelong educator who recently retired after 30-plus years in public schools, told me that I’d regret not leaving now. My sister walked into our house one day, saw me down, and put it more succinctly than anyone else: “You owe it to yourself and your family to do this.”
But teaching. But teaching.
Once I decided, I didn’t have a single second thought. Until I told my students.
After that day, exactly one month until my final day at school, I questioned everything. Carly had to remind me, daily, of why I was leaving. (I really don’t deserve her.) Some nights I lay awake, wondering if I had just made a giant mistake and if it was too late to get my job back. A couple of my students asked me if it was some elaborate prank, and I remember wishing that it was.
Everyone else, for their part, was more understanding of the decision than I was. My students handled it like champs. Their parents were kind and supportive. Several people told me they were proud of me. I found that strange: I felt the opposite of proud, like I was doing something wrong.
Some of those feelings still linger. As I was cleaning out our garage last week, I finally worked up the courage to read some of the notes my students gave to me on my last day. They were, I thought as I read them proudly, remarkably aware and mature and kind. One of them, from a girl named Emily, whose eyes carried an undeniable sadness after I told them I was leaving, wrote perhaps the best coda to the entire thing: “I know this is going to be really hard but because of you I know I’m capable of getting through it.” My eyes began to water as I looked at a soft wind brushing a tree in our front yard. Rory stood a few feet in front of it, scooping mud into a cup and pouring it out into the mulch, her dress soaked through and turned brown. The juxtaposition — my students in my hand and my daughter in front of my eyes — was almost too fitting.
A day later, Emily’s letter still fresh in my mind, 16 miles into a 20-mile run, I broke down crying. I stopped, alone in the mountains, enveloped by a gray mist, and yelled into the clouds I was running through, “I just wanna know I didn’t do anything wrong. I just wanna know I did the right thing.”
I thought back to the leaves dancing in the wind outside our garage. How do you ever know, really, if you’re doing the right thing?
What I’m doing now for work — writing for a running website, doing test prep — is not as important as teaching because it can’t be. One of the few benefits of working in public education is that you never had to question if what you were doing every day was valuable. Some days were more influential than others, of course, and some felt like glorified babysitting. But teachers’ consistent daily presence in the lives of young people is perhaps their most irreplaceable trait.
The time with Mayla and Rory, though — that’s been a godsend. I used to picture fatherhood as a series of grand moments: taking your kids to get ice cream, jumping over the waves with them at the beach, watching them blow out the candles on their birthday cakes. Those are important, of course, but what I’m learning is that time — consistent, daily, unfettered time — is the most valuable currency. Mayla and Rory don’t really know I made an emotionally draining career change; Mayla just knows that I take her to school most mornings and Rory knows I read her Moana book before putting her down for her nap most afternoons. This time, too, is not linear. Like a pre-tariffs investment, it compounds: A couple songs that we played on the way to school have now become part of Mayla’s morning playlist (everything from Chappell Roan to John Denver to The Lion King soundtrack). I asked Rory if she wanted to eat lunch with me one day and now she expects to sit in my lap and pick the potato chips off my plate every afternoon. We played in the backyard a couple days in a row after lunch; now we’re out there almost every day, identifying dog poop I need to scoop and playing “I spy” as they swing. I’ve been around them and Carly so much more and that’s felt important.
I miss my students, of course. I miss their energy and life and incessant questions. I miss hearing about their soccer games on the weekend and making inside jokes with them. I miss the UNC gnome we named Smithy who watched over our class and the Wheaties box that I placed on whichever student particularly impressed me the previous day (they “ate their Wheaties”). I miss being a part of their lives.
Until I left I didn’t realize how much teaching had become a core part of my identity — not lesson planning and grading, but working with good people who care, being a public servant, fighting the good fight. Teaching is not a blue-collar job but neither is it white-collar, and I enjoyed living in that in-between.
I don’t think I’ve taught my last day. The ending felt too abrupt, too forced: I had to choose between my family and my students and maybe one day I can choose both. Maybe I’ll go back in three months or three years or three decades. Maybe these three months were a break, a step away from the frenetic pace of teaching. Maybe the only way to evaluate everything properly is from the outside. If I do go back, I’ll have a better sense of my limits and priorities. I will, I hope, be better.
But, as Carly has reminded me time and again, just because I no longer am a teacher doesn’t mean I never was. The lessons, the jokes, the memories — they will endure. There is part of me still in my classroom.
I approached this entire thing trying to identify the right decision. But maybe that misses the point. Maybe there is no “right” choice; maybe it’s just a choice that I had to make and I made it and now I have to deal with the good and bad parts. Both were defensible; both were “right” in their own ways. Maybe that’s how life goes.
Maybe I should stop thinking about it.
Your last day, a Friday in February, arrives. After reading in the woods and watching videos and playing outside and a frantic going-away party, finally, mercifully, the bell rings.
This is it, you realize with startling clarity right then: the last moments of your career as a teacher.
So you wait, trying to extend it perhaps, trying to stop time, trying to remember these final minutes because you know it will never again be the same. You stand there, at the end of the hallway, waiting for your soon-to-be former students to hear their name called to walk outside to their parents’ cars, waiting to say goodbye and wondering if you said everything you’d wanted to say because this is your final chance to be their teacher. You wait in silence.
“Emily Harper.”
The name comes in a shrill from the walkie talkie. Emily, whose note will bring you to tears two months later, stands up, grabs her backpack, makes her way toward you. Her eyes are puffy and red.
“I’m gonna miss ya, Emily,” you tell her, wrapping her in a hug. “Be good.” You’re self-conscious about your parting words and watch her as she wordlessly walks away. You hope that all of the memories — the day she wore mismatched shoes just because, her monthly suggestion for your new watch background, the sticky note from you she still keeps in her binder — go with her.
You repeat this with a dozen more students and it doesn’t get any easier.
Finally, it’s 3:15. Time to go. You say goodbye to your few students remaining. The last one, because of course it is, because God knows you need this, because maybe this is a movie, is Jayden, one of your favorite students of the hundreds you’ve ever taught, who came from a different school this year and didn’t know anybody and who looked like a lost deer for the first month, wide-eyed and hesitant, but who grew into it, who made close friends and started cracking jokes and loved to watch soccer highlights with you, who worked hard and said, “Too-da-loo, Mr. Harms” every time he left your classroom, who represents the reason why you got into this stupid, wonderful, irrational, draining, redeeming, imperfect, infinitely important profession eight years ago.
He smiles as you walk up to him. God bless him. You needed to see that smile one more time.
You extend your hand to dap him up. He catches it perfectly. The crisp sound echoes through the emptying hallway.
“Family first, Mr. Harms,” he says with a smile, and two months later it still makes you cry.
“That’s right,” you tell him, and walk back to your classroom for the last time.
Essays of Dad 