Why I Quit Teaching –Part I

A few weeks ago I resigned my teaching position at the local public high school.

Whenever someone asks me why I did something, I usually tell them that it is an irrelevant question. (Yes, as you may have guessed, conversations with me are not any fun. Oh, they’re fun for me, of course.) When I worked as a volunteer in refugee shelters in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, people often asked me that question and that was when I came up with my snarky answer. But, while mildly off-putting, it’s the real answer for a few reasons.

First, the question is irrelevant because I never do anything for just one reason. In fact, I have multiple motives for just about anything serious that I do in life. I suspect other people are the same way but some of them are happy condensing all of their reasons into one glib remark. I’m not. Usually, there are so many reasons behind my actions that it would take a ridiculously long time to answer a question that probably was not asked in earnest anyway (my misanthropic tendency shows a bit, doesn’t it?). Sometimes, I am afraid to admit, I cannot even find the words to state my motives; so what is the point of answering?

Second, the reason I continue to do something is often completely distinct from the reason I began to do it. This was certainly the case in Juarez, when I worked in a Mexican homeless shelter called Casa Peregrino. I am pretty sure that I came there, fresh out of college, in order to save the world. I stuck around for a year and a half for a succession of reasons that eventually withered up and died before I quit and moved on. Sometimes, when asked the dreaded question, I would reply, “Ask me why I stay. I’m not the same person who arrived here last year, so there’s no point in telling you why he came.”

Third, I don’t like answering a question like that because, if it is asked in earnest, then the person will usually try to spar with me over a decision I have already made, and I don’t discuss things that I have already decided. For instance, if I told an inquirer that I left teaching because I didn’t feel that the public education system was properly serving children, then I might suddenly find myself in an argument about how I could change the system from the inside. (Picture me gagging in jest as I gesture toward my open mouth with my index finger.)

But I am going to try to work out why I have quit teaching twice in the last four years and, on this most recent occasion, in the middle of an economic recession.