To career change to primary teaching?

[RedYellowGreenBlu]

I am a qualified lawyer. I hate it. I have been trying to escape for four years but I am struggling to find another career I want to do. In part that is down to logistics – location, having two DCs etc (so cannot just start from scratch either). I am 41 and qualified in 2010. I earn well but not as much as you would think. I don't want to go inhouse etc etc.

I keep getting drawn back to teaching, again and again. I recently saw a career specialist who did personality stuff and teaching came up, again.
The reason I have not taken the plunge is family members, friends and friends of friends have all told me no. Don't do it - too stressful.

Does anyone teach who actually enjoys it? If you hate it – why? Where do you live?

What is your teaching experience?

From what you say about your reasoning for wanting to leave law, I think you will just be changing the problems to a new situation but with less pay.

Teacher of a decade here and sounds like you need to volunteer but to actually ask to shadow a teacher aka don't go home at 3.30. See them assess, plan, resource and reply to "I'm just checking, not complaining" emails from parents.

Might be wrong, but I think the children obviously give me the satisfaction in my job but I feel like being able to make a to do list and finish it (i imagine hard deadlines in law but again i may be wrong) would give me ultimate job satisfaction right now. Therefore I never feel good enough because I know there's always something else I can be doing.

A colleague of mine switched from corporate to teaching a few years back. They're now leaving teaching because they originally left corporate because they "didn't want to work 100 hour weeks anymore", and found they worked the same hours now.

If you're burning out, teaching is not for you. You will still have similar worries all day - that you didn't make the right call regarding a child, that litigation is brought against you, that some parent will take to social media or the press and your name will be mud. And you will do all of that for a pittance and zero autonomy.

I'm leaving teaching as soon as my mortgage is paid off if things carry on the way they are, even though I live and breathe the job. But even with meticulous organisation I am currently at the end of my capacity, both mentally and physically.

I love teaching but I work four days. I spend the fifth day working and still have to fit some into weekends and evenings, but it’s more manageable. Is it something you could consider- the pay is appalling but if you would love teaching we need all the teachers we can get!

High stress, high workload and lower wage though?

I switched career into primary teaching at 50. I think I may have posted on that other thread, can’t remember. There are many things that I’ve found fabulous about teaching:

• always being active
• being with children, really fun, lively and challenging
• great colleagues
• lots of variety

However, the downsides include:

• PGCE year when I did almost nothing at all for the family - that was hard for them and hard for me (guilt, sense of wrong priorities).
• I have more sleepless nights than in any previous job ever. Usually related to emails from parents which quite often are dashed off in the heat of the moment or after some wine and can absolutely disappear into nothing or equally blow up into something horrendous.
• Extreme highs and lows - of emotion, of workload, of everything.

I work at an independent school which has advantages (class size, relative freedom around curriculum, lovely supportive community of colleagues and SLT) and disadvantages (low salary, poor pension, very demanding parents, precarious future).

This isn’t a job I’d leap into again if I’m honest and certainly isn’t a job where your stress levels would be reduced.

I am not diminishing anyone’s experiences on here when I say this - I truly mean it. But the stress and worry that comes with the high stakes in my current job cannot be matched by teaching.

Interested about the emails. That’s something I would genuinely stress over. When they say blow up do you mean complaints etc - or something else?

Could have written this myself.

@RedYellowGreenBlu Are you dead set on primary? I enjoy my secondary role. There are so many opportunities for career progression too.

@countdowntonap Not dead set. Perhaps it would be the behaviour side that would be on my mind at secondary?

Maybe. Maybe not.
What about the worry of seeing a 4 year old go home into an environment that you suspect is abusive but being unable to protect them? When concerns have been reported but nothing can be done because it’s all a bit vague (nothing disclosed, just a few things being said which don’t feel right, a couple of bits of odd behaviour, and parents where behaviour is ok on the surface but mum won’t say anything without glancing at dad and it all feels very ‘off’).

I don’t think you can guarantee you won’t worry in the same way.

Teaching in secondary is challenging- not in primary. You can scale the pay scale by becoming slt.

Sorry - I was replying to this post and managed to clear the quote.

@RedYellowGreenBlu the majority are niggles and gripes. Often a reaction to something a child has said about their day, usually based on a misunderstanding or leaping to a wrong conclusion. Or irritation following gossip on the class WhatsApp. I suppose the issue is parents can email us directly. If they had to go via the office I think they’d moderate what they say. OR the office would filter out the unnecessary communications.
Proper complaints are few and far between, (I have never experienced one but a colleague has), I have a constant and real fear that those niggles will become a complaint so constantly fear slightly nauseous.

Oh god that’s me to a tee!

OP, how old are your own children?

I'm a solicitor too and really want to get out of law. I have had multiple strangers tell me they assumed I was a teacher because of how I interact with my children and others at birthday parties/activities etc.

However, in the last couple of years my DS1 has started school and it hasn't exactly been plain sailing (like about 6 children in his class he is waiting for an ASD assessment and he has struggled with behaviour and accessing the curriculum). Having seen what his teachers do I've concluded that I'd find it really, really hard to do the same thing well.

It's the number of competing interests and relationships you have to balance - with kids, parents and colleagues - while also being ultimately judged on something that's not even fully within your control, ie the performance of 30 young children, some of whom have little support or encouragement from home. You need bags and bags of patience and a pretty thick skin.

As a single parent of pre-teens, I thought teaching would be a good career - no juggling childcare over all the holidays etc. My mum was a primary school teacher and my dad was a university lecturer.

It was the most time consuming and stressful thing I have ever done. During my PGCE and NQT year I barely saw my kids as I was spending every minute doing lesson preparation, marking or writing up university work.

I had some really bad experiences where I wasn’t adequately supported and left after about 6 months.

And literally the first thing you do is diminish other people's experiences.

Stress is not defined by its cause but by the effect it has. It doesn't matter whether the branch is broken by one tiger or 100,000 sparrows, it still breaks.

I have worked with children with complex needs across education and health for over 30 years.

I've been in situations with 17 year olds kicking me and waving chairs at my head.

I've sat next to children whose grasp on life is so fragile that several times a day we've had to check bood oxygen, give the little chap a gentle shake and say "Remember to breathe".

I've been part of a multidisciplinary team making decisions about life-changing irreversible surgery.
And I was sent to the bleakest place in my life by 4 years of relentlessly being told that I was shit when faced with hours of utterly pointless tasks designed to micromanage out any hint of individual professional judgement.

I love kids. But teaching is increasingly soul-destroying. Stress isn't about high stakes. It's about lack of control.

"I am not diminishing anyone’s experiences on here when I say this - I truly mean it. But the stress and worry that comes with the high stakes in my current job cannot be matched by teaching."

Hold my beer.

I knew by making that comment that the thread would descend into a crescendo of angry and offended people. I’m being honest about my current line of work and the horrendous impact it has had on me and my life for the last 15 years.

It fucks me off because now I’ll get a load of abuse and not want to come back to the thread and read fucking amazing contributions from people. Also fucking annoying being lectured on stress like I don’t know what that is. Christ

Thanks - they’re 8&11. Like I say I’ve been back and forth with it over the years. I used to love how rewarding my job was but the reward is dwarfed by the other shit not to mention constant worry about getting a complaint or making a mistake which ends in negligence claim/career end.

As a pp said, could you look into what would be required for you to teach law, either to 16-18 year olds, or to 18+ / adults? I qualified in a profession, and found it very stressful, but managed to shift sideways to teaching a related subject and had a number of very enjoyable years as a teaching fellow (at a couple of universities). It makes such a difference when your students have actually chosen to be there, and when they are motivated to succeed. When I left my professional career, I did postgraduate study in a related field, which helped get my foot in the door for a teaching role afterwards. I was very lucky in that mine was not the primary income in the family, so I was able to take the hit on that front.

I can see how that comment will get people's backs up. To me (I know a lot of stressed and miserable lawyers) it suggests that you're not keeping your current work stress in perspective.

I'm not sure what your practice area is, but I work on high value, important business transactions - but even if I totally drop the ball on something, no-one actually dies. Even if I got struck off, the sky wouldn't actually fall in, I'd still have my family and my health. However it is very very difficult to keep that perspective, and not being able to do that suggests burnout.

If your skills and natural talents tend towards teaching, but school teaching isn't fully grabbing you, have you thought about something like professional training or coaching, or maybe something like an HR role overseeing and coaching trainees? I saw someone once on here who moved from private practice to working for a university mentoring and supporting apprentices in professional services.