r/TeacherFriends

How do you go about the first few weeks of school for middle school? I’ll have 9 different classes. , 8 of them I will have 3X per week for 50mins each and 1 will be once a week for 50mins. Clearly I’m not going to jump right into content but into expectations. What does this look like for you at the middle school level? I’m looking to change things up in the fall.

Edit: I teach in Canada. I teach grade 6,7,8 social studies. I teach 9 different classes, 28+ students each class so a minimum of 252 students in total. I get 1 prep period per day and teach 5 periods per day. This is pretty much standard aside from teaching 3 different grade levels, this part is new to me.

33 F. ADHD and Anxiety. I was the kid who played teacher with a class full of stuffed animals and a little chalkboard eisel. I graduated high school and immediately knew I wanted to be a teacher. I had a great nannying job in my neighborhood and that contributed. College was easy for me, finding a teaching job afterwards was not. Once I finally did, I felt immensely underprepared. Classroom management was always the hardest part. The school I was at (charter) liked me though, and were ultimately willing to work with me to find a good fit. I switched from art to 4th grade to reading intervention to 1st grade.

Eventually after 5 years I left that school because I didn’t feel like I was growing. I took a position teaching online which I enjoyed because it didn’t require the constant behavior management and overstimulation I was getting in the classroom. Unfortunately that position got cut so I had to look for a different job the next year. I got one at another school (public), and failed miserably. Again, classroom management. I took training, watched videos, read books, worked with a mentor, observed other classes. None of it worked. I was let go by the end of the year. That really hurt. But still, I kept trying.

Unfortunately, every teaching job I landed after that went sideways. I got let go three times after that. It all came down to the same thing- constant behaviors, classroom management, and no support. “We love you as a person, but-“ Is something I got tired of hearing. After this last time, I realized the difficult truth- this career isn’t for me. I didn’t love it. I didn’t even LIKE it anymore. There would be mornings I felt physically sick about facing the classroom. I pride myself in caring, A LOT. But caring isn’t enough in this field. Clearly I don’t have what it takes and I’ve accepted that. I’m not going to keep trying and failing when I’ve put in so much effort to improve and haven’t. At this point I’m just wasting my time trying to be successful in a career I have actually grown to hate. My self esteem has plummeted because of this.

I’m looking for advice for others who have decided to leave the classroom. I had an interview today for a photography position and I have another one Wednesday for a Behavior technician job. Art and writing are my true talents, but I’m good with people and kids. I know I’ll find something eventually, I’m just kind of feeling discouraged and would love to hear others stories who have gone through something similar.

Hi everyone,

I've been teaching English for the past 6 years, 2 years in an ICSE school and around 4 years teaching IELTS, GRE, GMAT, and other English courses.

Lately, I've realized that while I still love education, I don't think I want to continue as a classroom teacher anymore. It's not that I hate teaching, but I don't see myself doing it for the next 10 or 20 years.

What I actually enjoy the most is creating lesson plans, designing worksheets, writing assessments, and figuring out how to teach something in the most effective way.

The idea of becoming a curriculum developer feels like a much better fit for me, but I honestly have no idea how people make that transition.

I've already created a lot of teaching material over the years, and I'm currently working on an IELTS book and a Korean language book. I just don't know how to turn all of this into something that employers would actually value.

For those of you who made the switch from teaching to curriculum development, how shall I do it too?

I've been at my current district since 2021, so I'm going into my sixth year. I'm about in the middle of the department for seniority, because a huge number of people transferred to another school early on.

I had a room for two years, but at the start of this year, I was told I was back to being a floater. The reason given was that they changed the system to give AP teachers priority, then teachers with bigger classes.

I was also assured that it was temporary and I would almost certainly get a classroom again next year.

This has never happened to anyone else in the department in the time I've been here, and even changing rooms, much less losing one entirely, is very rare. I was even told myself in the past I had nothing to worry about.

Well, I got a letter telling me next year I'm set to be a floater again. I emailed my department head about this and was given a vague answer about "multiple factors." I looked through the list of teachers and even filtering for APs, Honors, and ELLs, there's still three teachers lower in seniority who have rooms. Rooms are assigned based on department, and since it's Social Studies, there isn't any equipment considerations.

I was lead to believe it was just bad luck of the draw. Maybe so last year. I don't buy it anymore.

My impression? My department head knows I interviewed to go to that same other school the other co-workers went to a few years back. They've been actively critical of me for that choice.

So when they decided to rework the system to give priority to APs and such, they needed to kick someone out of the rotation. They already saw me as a potential flight risk, so the logic was to not piss people off less likely to leave.

Is this worth leaving the district over? Is it potentially greviable despite not being in the contract? Is this normal or uncommon in other districts?

Thank you,

Someone told me today: “If you don’t know what you want to do, be a teacher. If you can’t teach, be a gym teacher.”

Personally, as a young person currently on the way to becoming a teacher, I found this interesting (and slightly disrespectful). Teaching is so often portrayed as a second-choice career, or a fallback if you don’t make it “further” in your profession.

I’m curious, what’s your story?

I posted a few days ago about my favorite job boards I used recently to find my new remote, full time instructional design job. I see so many posts about users saying they feel trapped, they can’t get out, etc. I wanted to make another post to explain how I did my pivot to maybe help some people get a foothold into a new path out.

First, you aren’t trapped. I know it feels like it. I certainly felt that way too. I think what helped spur me on was my health. I had hit a wall and just could not do it anymore. My husband and I decided before August that this was my last year. I couldn’t quit immediately, we needed the money and my kids’ enrollments were tied to my employment. For me, this is absolutely an element of religion to this, I couldn’t have walked this path without God’s help. I did all the work but He opened the doors. There’s no other way to describe what happened.

I decided in August I was going for instructional design. You have to decide on a path. Especially in this market, you cannot spray your resume and pray. You’ve got to get specific and drill down on what you want. Using Ed Skip’s board, you can see a lot of the popular job fields teachers go into if you don’t know what to do yet.

I spent from August to November learning all I could about ID. I followed Tim Slade and Devlin Peck religiously, watched all their videos, joined their online communities. The learning principles I already knew, I just didn’t know the fancy ID names for them. Adult learning principles are barely different from child. I took notes in a big spiral notebook, cross referencing different ID resources from IDs in the field and universities. All free. I didn’t pay for anything.

From December to March, I designed 3 “corporate” eLearning courses and created all their documentation like action maps, storyboards, process write ups, etc. I learned Articulate Rise and Storyline. All of this went well. I had one major crash out over Storyline triggers but after screenshotting myself doing it, I figured it was just me doing it wrong, lol. I created my online portfolio with these courses, documentation, and explanations plus my assessment suite I’d designed and pulled data from for 3 years from my work at school. I used Squarespace.

From March to my offer in June, I did at least 5 job applications per day. Sometimes more if there were good hits that day. I used my planning period and at night and weekends. I interviewed with 3 companies. My new employer required 4 levels of interviews. It still took several weeks before I got an offer.

One thing I see a lot of people talking about is they still have a “teacher” resume. Unless you are planning to stay in K12, you MUST change the language and terminology on your resume. Whatever you want your new job title to be, that’s what it needs to be on your resume. I changed all of my job titles to represent something ID-adjacent or outright ID. It’s not a lie because I did do those ID things at that school. Pick out what you want to highlight. Teaching is like 80 jobs in one. There is no way to include all we do in 5 bullet points. So pull out what is relevant to the job you’re applying for. Claude.ai was super helpful for this for me. I gave it a job description and my resume and we worked to get it in ID corporate language. It asks great reflective questions and helped me pull out things from ten years ago I didn’t even realize were ID related.

Your resume should highlight how you can do the job you want to apply to. Recruiters spend on average 6 seconds on a resume. Don’t expect them to translate your experience into what they want because they just won’t. Your resume goes in the trash. Spell it out for them directly. Use keywords from the job description. Like writing in English classes: “answer the question by restating the question.”

If you want corporate or higher Ed, no more “students, parents, admin, lesson plans, etc.” Now it’s “learners, stakeholders, upper management, learning experiences, etc.” Also, if your bullet points simply state what job you did or what skill it was, you’ve got to revamp.

Bullet points should follow the formula of “skill or activity + metric to prove that/provide scale + effect or problem solved.”

Example: “Designed a full assessment suite for two learning cohorts based on performance gap data which raised average proficiency rates from 65 to 80% since 2024 after iterative reflection and development.”

In K12 language, this tells them I made my own assessment suite for two grade levels, which I did because of performance gaps in their knowledge, and after going through the iterative process (observe, fix, reassess, etc), since 2024 I was able to raise their proficiency on these assessments from 65 to 80%.

To a corporation, this means I know how to take performance gap data, why employees aren’t performing correctly on something like nurses not properly disposing of needles after giving patients shots, and develop learning/training or assessments to address that problem, observe the data (Kirkpatrick model), and then either fix the training to do better, or it shows proficiency and meets the company’s overall goal of nurses properly disposing of needles. Iteration means you just go through this process over and over. Nothing should ever be perfect. As teachers we iterate constantly.

Look at what you’ve done as a teacher. Does your experience lean more toward ID and curriculum design? Or maybe you’re an Ed tech pioneer and would love to help districts roll out new platforms? Or you want to do online teaching? Maybe you have experience in graphic design or similar and could design product for a company?

See what you have first before trying to go back to school for another degree. In my recent job hunt, it doesn’t seem to matter what your degree is in just so long as you have one. I have a BA in English and a Masters of Library Science yet I got an ID job. LinkedIn has learning courses you can take but honestly, most of the tech have free trials. I built my portfolio off of Articulate’s free trial, no money needed. Save paying for something you really need a lot of guidance in.

And through my timeline, you saw that I was doing all of this during the school year. It wasn’t fun, I won’t lie, and I also had gallbladder surgery in October so that threw my timeline off a bit and I had to hustle in November. But it did work. It just sucked. I was essentially doing two full time jobs and taking care of my kids. But I think the fact that I had it planned out and knew what milestones I wanted to reach and when helped keep me on track and not lose sight of what I needed to do.

This post is not to glorify myself because this would not have happened if God wasn’t on my side. I still can’t wrap my head around this new company I’m working for actually wanting me when I know there are more experienced people out there. But this is clearly what He wants me to be doing.

I just want to help and hopefully this reaches someone and inspires them to make the change because if you felt like I did last year, I know you need it desperately and you deserve it.

Good luck to everyone and this market is brutal so just be patient and consistent.

I work with children and had a difficult session that I’m feeling really ashamed about. But also happens every now and then and I end up feeling terrible.
This time. I was already overwhelmed from supporting a child who was distressed for around 30–40 minutes. Later, another child became verbally aggressive and made a threatening gesture, and I froze because I wasn’t sure if they were going to hurt me. After that, I felt really overwhelmed. During group session when a different child ignored expectations and left the group to play, I reacted too out of anger, it got the best of me and handled it in a way I’m not proud of. Resulted in me throwing the toy in the bin
I apologised to the children, corrected myself, told my manager, and I know what I should do differently next time. But I still feel disgusted with myself and scared that families will see me as a bad educator.
I’m looking for support around anger regulation, shame after mistakes, and how to pause before reacting when I feel unsafe, ignored, or overwhelmed. Has anyone learned practical strategies that helped them stop the “switch” before it takes over?

I’m also confused because most of the time I can handle a lot of challenges and behaviours and then there’s some days where I feel like I react angrily and I become firm or do something like ^ throw a toy in the bin.