GUILTY...I felt guilty as hell when I decided to leave teaching. Even though I knew I was losing myself and had to get out. In this episode of How to Leave Teaching, I reflect on Dolly Parton’s belief that love and nurturing can take many forms and what that might teach us about leaving the classroom.You can be an important person in your students’ lives without belonging to them forever. You can grieve your students, miss the teacher you once were, and still know that leaving was the right decision.The love was real. The work mattered. And you are still allowed to leave!

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If you desperately want to leave teaching—but feel guilty, selfish, or ashamed for even considering it—you may need to get angry.

Teachers are given responsibility for problems they didn’t create, denied the resources needed to solve them, and then blamed when personal sacrifice isn’t enough. When they finally reach their breaking point, their desire to leave is treated as proof that they never cared enough.

That isn’t a personal failure. It’s a trap.

In this episode of the Teacher Recovery Series, I explain how political underfunding, teacher scapegoating, culture-war outrage, and the expectation that teachers should “do it for the kids” keep educators exhausted, compliant, and afraid to walk away.

I draw on my experience as a K–12 teacher, college professor, Department of Education researcher, U.S. Senate legislative aide, and staffer at the White House Office of Management and Budget to examine why:

• School scarcity is the predictable result of political choices
• Exhausted teachers have less power to organize or demand change
• Structural failures are repackaged as failures of resilience or classroom management
• Teachers are expected to compensate for poverty and institutional neglect through personal sacrifice
• A heavily feminized profession is told that love should replace boundaries, authority, and fair compensation
• Teachers are condemned as selfish the moment they stop sacrificing

Your burnout does not mean you failed your students. Wanting to leave does not mean you never cared. Your anger may be the thing that finally helps you see the situation clearly—and gives you permission to save yourself.

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Teachers aren't just burned out — they're trained to give until there's nothing left, and called "good" for it. In this episode, I break down identity capture: the mechanism that turns your best traits — self-sacrifice, niceness, compliance, perfectionism — into free labor.I taught for 9 years — 4 in a Title I high school, 5 at a public university — and I left both feeling used, betrayed, and honestly, a little abused. This episode is about why that happens, not just that it happens.We get into:→ Why "good teacher" traits are the same traits patriarchy demands of women generally — and why that's not a coincidence→ The "remember your why" script, and how it functions as a leash, not a pep talk→ What it actually costs to build your whole identity on a job that can end without warning→ The reflection question I want you to sit with this weekIf you've ever asked yourself "am I a punching bag, or a person" — this one's for you.🍎 More at goldendelicious.ai — building the app for teachers navigating what's next.