Even though I referenced my dissatisfaction with my current line of work in my first dispatch as a Newsletter Bastard, and though I make little secret of that frustration at any time and place other than when I’m trapped by these walls, as insulated from reality as they are from the tenuous warmth of a Western New York spring,¹ it occurs to me that I still haven’t explained why I want to leave.

In one sense, it’s to my advantage to leave myself unexplained. There is no shortage of perfectly sensible reasons why a person with their head properly screwed on, in 2026, might not want to be a teacher anymore.

I even share some of them. For one, there’s being in more danger on a daily basis than anyone at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner; for another, the workload, which (as in the rest of the service sector) includes a significant amount of emotional labor, forced volunteering, and job description creep; for a third, the sneers, no less infuriating for their inevitability, from people who wish they had the summers “off” or would love to be “done” at 3 PM.²

Unfortunately, I promised that I would be for real, and so real I shall be: I’m leaving teaching because I increasingly find my students completely insufferable. As an educator, you’re not supposed to say that about the children for whom you are expected to take a bullet, from whom you’re supposed to learn as much as they learn from you,³ whose respect you’re supposed to earn, whom you should coach more than teach⁴, and who are, after all, our future . . . but it’s true.

Before you get too mad at me, note that I haven’t said any of this is their fault.

Most of my students have been well and truly failed by a society that, whether through inaction or active collusion, has allowed a bunch of neofeudalist techlords to transform all of us into gullible children incapable of focusing in order to expand their control over our lives. In more proximate ways, they’re failed by neglectful and permissive parents who see us as overpaid babysitters who should be thankful to be paid at all and administrators who see their classroom colleagues as natural adversaries both to the students and to themselves, because we have the putative audacity to sometimes say “no.”

Trouble is, as much as you might remind yourself of those facts ad nauseam when you’re grading quizzes or marshaling the last of your energy to get through last period, there’s only so much psychological buttressing can survive spending several hours of your one wild and precious life trying to get ostensible middle schoolers to keep their shoes on, let alone tied.⁵

If I allow myself a cubic speck beyond the absolute minimum of volume needed to discuss this, I’ll make this a series (and neither you nor I want that when I could spend that time talking about baseball instead), so I intend this to be more or less my final words on the subject. At least, that’s the plan unless I find something else to do with my time, or my workplace finds an exciting new way to give me agita. (So there’s your sequel hook, I suppose.)

Combined with the general apocalyptism of turning my back on the only work I’ve been allowed to do for the past decade and a half, my theatrical personality demands I present my reasoning in suitable grandiosity.⁶ So:

War

One of the particularly irksome aspects of being an educator in 2026 is that, while everyone has finally figured out what all of us who paid attention knew in 2011—USians are proudly, profoundly, and maybe permanently anti-intellectual, and there is no possible educational culture that can survive long-term contact with that truth—this realization only came after a pack of fascist hogs led by Ron DeSantis successfully decimated several states’ educational systems (and the military’s, for good measure) under the banner of “parental rights” and other Orwellian claptrap.

Increasingly, students within our school and parents outside of it object to readings for religious reasons, complain that teachers aren’t staying out of politics and sticking to the subject matter, and generally make it clear that they see us as a bunch of blue-haired woke liberals trying to indoctrinate their children into gay cultural Marxism.

Gross? Yes.
Annoying? Also yes.
Completely expected, given that USians long ago turned their collective back on the idea of learning or knowledge as something worth attaining for anything other than job-related reasons? Definitely.

The war on expertise in this country didn’t start in 2016, or 2009, or 2001. It may have begun in 1949, but I’d even make a case that it began in 1865, in response to the idea that the rights the Founding Fathers so boldly delineated for themselves could be expanded to other people within the USian experiment.

Unsurprisingly, most of the students I have who still recognize the value of the education they’re getting (and the work that their teachers put into making that possible) come from nontraditional backgrounds for my building: children of immigrants, students of color, LGBT kids, or just plain ol’ lower-middle-class.

The rest don’t see what all the fuss is about: they’re not here to do school, they’re here because they have to be if they want to play lacrosse or baseball or soccer or hockey, since the United States holds schools hostage to their own athletic programs.⁷ They make slight exceptions for STEM classes, because all of them had propaganda for those subjects pushed on them since it had to be sent in Morse code down their umbilical cords, but us humanities folks are shit out of luck. Turns out that when you’ve grown up expecting to inherit your parents’ businesses, or at least their place in the gentry, you don’t really care about what a bunch of nerds with useless degrees want to tell you about the Gracchi brothers or Maximilien Robespierre.

In turn, how exactly are you supposed to feel passionate about your subject and present it engagingly, if no amount of energy or excitement or dialogue or kindness changes a fundamental cultural dynamic in which it is not only justifiable, but expected, for anyone of any age to decide that they’re just done expanding their knowledge?

Famine

I teach in a city where two-fifths of children grow up in poverty, a statistic that should embarrass every single Rochesterian into revolution.

Almost none of the students I’ve ever had fall into this category. They go, full-bellied and happy from sports or theater or video games or whatever their thing is, to comfortable beds in big houses in safe neighborhoods, loved and cared for by stable families with the money to send them off to the kind of high school that crawls over broken glass to get them into a “good” college so that, one day, they might donate enough money to put their name on a building.

What most of them suffer from instead is a spiritual famine: much less immediately horrifying than its corporeal sibling, but equally disastrous to the social fabric.

Rather than withhold food, what we withhold from my students is all the things that make growth possible: responsibility, accountability, and self-reflection. You don’t get Donald Trump’s remaining neuron riding the votes of young men to a second term, and you don’t get whatever the fuck Clavicular is, in a world where boys, in particular, are held to any actual standard of behavior.

Instead, thanks to multiple generations who feel a profound need to memory-hole their own teenage years, I watch my students not only take longer to mature, but take longer to start maturing: behavior that in 2021 was strictly eighth-grade stuff, for example, is now typical of sophomores.

Meanwhile, it is clear that my students are almost never asked to take into account anyone beyond themselves (and potentially the person they’re talking to at the moment) as real beings who exist in the world, take up space, and deserve acknowledgment as something other than non-player characters in their story.

The worst part is that they know this isn’t how it works in the real world: they will never act like this towards their bosses, their coaches, or anyone else who can lord something they want over them. They can do it to their teachers, though, because why would they care what we think of them? No one else does.

Pestilence

Here the obvious referent is COVID-19, which undeniably had a pernicious (and ongoing) effect on pedagogy. Relitigation of pandemic measures is popular even on the left (mostly by college faculty or people who consider jobs “real” only if they require steel-toed boots), but I get to live in the other reality, where the pandemic did not exist—just a flu, children can’t spread it, no one suffered permanent damage, only the elderly were at risk of dying—and yet living through this unreal thing was such a debacle that administrators, colleagues, and students within my building to this day seem to think we spent the 2020-21 school year teaching remotely. I wish we had; those months I spent struggling to get up stairs or sleeping two hours a night were not what you’d call fun.

Not that I want to let a virus that killed millions off the hook, exactly, but COVID-19 also gets blamed for things that were happening long before it. Most notably, while the pandemic poured Greek fire upon the existing dehumanization of teachers and assault on public education, much of the groundwork for the multilayered siege under which we find ourselves right now is due to the millions upon millions of dollars schools handed to Apple, Google, Microsoft, and dozens if not hundreds of edtech startups whose main goal seems to be allowing teachers who had literally any marketable 21st-century skills to leave the classroom behind.

Now, the backlash to technology grows thanks to the ethical disaster known as “AI”, which finally made it cool again to like paper and pencil.⁸ I nonetheless have to admit that there are many things I did not sign up to do when I chose to become a teacher, and among them was serve as a technology addiction counselor for students whose only way of sitting still for longer than a couple minutes at a time is to stare at a screen playing Infinite Craft.

Which, admittedly, is pretty fun.

Conquest

My particular tragedy is that, at least in my building, I am alone in this. Most of my coworkers understand some part or another of what I’ve just said, and they empathize with what they don’t, but they don’t have this traumatic soup curdling in their brain-pans.

Frankly, I don’t think they know what it’s like to teach kids who work less hard than they did, laboring under lower expectations than were placed on them, for a greater reward than they ever received. They don’t know what it’s like to know in your bones that a fifth of the people you talked to in college thought you got into a New Ivy because you’re a token (how could they know? What could prepare them for that?), and that now you write recommendation letters for kids whose grades are worse than yours to get into “better” schools than any of the ones you applied to. I’m sure that I sound like a crank half the time, which is why I’ve all but stopped talking about this stuff at work.

It’s not just them, though. There’s dozens of TikTok and Instagram teachers who are proud participants of the pedagogical circular firing squad, who proclaim themselves “one of the good ones” because they alone understand that students are neurodivergent⁹, or that homework doesn’t really help learning, or that kids are under a lot of pressure these days, or whatever gets them views and positive attention from parents and administrators who want to believe that the main thing standing in the way of student success is the people with degrees in things they don’t understand.

Even if I had signed up for this job knowing that’s what was coming down the pike, I wouldn’t be able to do it anymore.

To be clear, I’m a realist. I know other jobs will suck in their own ways. I know finding another line of work means having a later official end of day, giving up my summers off, working at something other than my field.

But it might also mean no longer being the only person of any color in the workplace. It might mean being allowed to admit I’m not straight, and at this point rather a tenuous man. It might mean working with people who are actually expected to hold up their ends of bargains. It might mean having actual projects and tasks with end dates, summations, and conditions for success, rather than this ongoing attempt to fail less each succeeding day.

In short, it might mean having a job, rather than trying to fulfill an amorphous “calling” whose entire nature boils down to endless, thankless, pointless service to people who, for the most part, are lying to you when they say they appreciate you. They may not mean to, but they do.

With the economy the way it is, it might take me a while to find another job, and so my existence in the classroom may continue.

As of this February, however, my teaching career is over.

I will serve no longer.