What If We Stay?

I’ve learned a lot these past couple of weeks. I can talk about hashes, cracking them, John the Ripper—you name it. A month ago, I wouldn’t have known any of this. Honestly, I’m pretty sure I could break into your email by now. (Kidding, of course—I’d never use my powers for evil.) But today I hit a wall when the platform I’m using asked me to basically hack a machine from scratch. It got me thinking more deeply about what I’m learning and why.

I’ve been on the fence about leaving education for a while. When I stepped away from admin, it was after a stretch of rough leadership and some personal challenges that just wore me down. It wasn’t that the work was impossible—it’s that I’d been burning the candle at both ends for so long, I finally hit empty.

Still, a girl’s gotta eat. I couldn’t just hang out at home, and truthfully, I do love education. So I went back to the classroom. For the past two years, I’ve been teaching again—often feeling wildly overqualified. That’s not to say I’m above teaching, or that my practice can’t grow. It’s just that after years of implementing large-scale interventions and navigating high-level challenges, I feel underutilized.

At the same time, I have no desire to go back to 90-hour admin weeks. I know I can do it—I just don’t want to anymore. I like having some balance. So now I’m in this weird in-between space. I miss coaching teachers, miss having more responsibility, miss juggling big-picture work—but I also don’t want to get steamrolled by an unsustainable workload.

And that’s what led me to cybersecurity—and to possibly leaving education altogether. But here’s the kicker: even while I’m enjoying the learning, I’m still not 100% sure I want to abandon the 20 years of experience I have of being successful in my current career.

A while back, I had the idea of developing a support program for teachers suffering with burn out. It seems to me that there are plenty of career supports out there for people who are looking to leave Education (Happy to recommend some fantastic ones that I have found on Linked-In and other places!) but there isn’t much out there for people who are looking to STAY.

What I have learned through my own experience is that many educator’s lives aren’t balanced. We learn all about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (Pictured Below) but we never give ourselves the grace of implementing it for ourselves. That doesn’t surprise me much because while educational research about the topic of teacher burnout abounds, there’s very little in terms of a comprehensive approach that acknowledges the effects that our careers have on our lives. Most of us aren’t meeting our physiological or safety needs, but we are trying to cultivate a sense of love, belonging and esteem for ourselves, families and our students, while also battling overwhelming battles that undermine our opportunities to seek self-actualization. Current research focuses on the job. But I feel fairly certain that the decline in teachers entering and staying in the field just isn’t about the 8 to 10 hours we are in the building. The issue is building a life around service work that works on all levels.

All of this has me thinking more seriously about next steps. I’m not at all sorry I’ve been diving into cybersecurity, data analysis, and coding. These are incredible skills—ones that could be useful even if I decide to stay in education. More than that, it’s been energizing to learn something new, to teach myself, and to get that dopamine rush from figuring something out on my own.

Still, I keep wondering: what if we stayed? What if, instead of leaving education, we chose to stay—but to stay differently? That question has been sitting with me for the past two years. I think a lot about what could happen if more people had access to the same tools, time, and resources I’ve had.

How might the system shift if we could actually climb that pyramid of needs? What if there were just as many supports for staying as there are incentives to walk away?

I haven’t made any decisions about my next steps, but I’m definitely contemplating a lot right now. Feel free to comment if you have any insights.

Success In Small Doses

Last week, I shared that I had started working with TryHackMe to learn cybersecurity, and I have continued to work on this front through the past week. A couple of things have happened. The first is that while I am still ready to transition out of education, working on something else that feels like an achievement has reminded me of when I was a baby teacher. And as a baby teacher, every day was a challenge, and was different. I was learning all the time! And I realize that after 20 years in education, things have gotten boring. It’s not that there’s nothing left for me to learn—I think the idea that you’ve mastered something that well is a bit of a fallacy.

But! The cognitive moves that it takes to master skills in teaching, learning and researching for practical application in that field are skills that I have mastered.
Learning cybersecurity is forcing me to employ an entirely new set of skills, to pull up information in my brain that I long forgot. In short, I’m learning what it means to be brand-new at something all over again, and I think that has been humbling, interesting, whimsical and honestly a bit of a joy.

Even if being brand-new is also scary, frustrating and exhausting at times.

During the last week, I finished the foundations courses related to Cybersecurity.

I was surprised at home much I knew from working with Python—how much scaffolding there was to “hang” things on. And also, how many things I still had to learn; how many pieces of information I had to teach myself when I didn’t have the cognitive frameworks “installed”. But I found a lot to be thankful for: Having worked on computers generally to get things done and having worked in Python some; having grown up with a DOS-based computer at the age of 7because my dad was a computer programmer; having friends and co-workers who were willing and able to help me with the most difficult concepts and ideas.

Having done the foundations work, I moved right along. I’m already about 25% done with with first cybersecurity certificate, and I’m excited and motivated to keep going!

Refining the Vision

So, as with most things, this journey into a new career has not been straightforward. I am not going to pretend, seeing the way that markets have been up-ended in the last couple of weeks has me so nervous to even think about leaving the classroom. Yes, teacher and administrator cuts sometimes happen. But in the past, I have more or less been able to avoid those by being the most qualified person in the room (figuratively, of course). By diversifying my certifications in the educational field, I could always serve for another content area, take on a different grade level, or pivot in administration to another role.
The “real” world feels so much more scary.

In addition to that, I have been trying to figure out exactly how I want to proceed. I started teaching myself how to code because I knew it was a valuable skill that would set me up for success. But I hadn’t been 100% clear on what I wanted to be able to use Python to be able to do. In fact, that lack of direction almost had me quit over the past month and resign myself to staying in education even though this career no longer makes me feel good about myself or about the future of our city, state and country.

But, I trusted the process. After a few weeks of sorting through my feelings, my understandings, my knowledge and my future goals, I started to get a better picture of how to proceed. I have continued to teach myself Python—I’m mastering loops at the moment!—and have also decided that with my skills and background I’m most interested in the field of cyber threat intelligence, specifically in the role as an analyst. I decided to use tryhackme.com to learn the skills and have decided to go back to school for a degree in computer science.

I think it’s notable that this isn’t just a straight and narrow decision to choose one career over another. It’s been a lot of stepping into different fields, examining what gets done in the day to day and deciding if that’s how I want to spend my time until I retire. I’m actually really thankful for the journey, because even though I could later choose to switch careers again, I’m really hoping to choose a field and stay there for a long, long time.

But every day is a new day forward, a new lesson to learn, a new start. So here I go onward!

Into the Thick of It

There’s a popular reel out there in the ether of the internet with a jingle that repeats, “Into the thick of it, into the thick of it…” and that’s a bit how I felt about learning how to code. I’ve learned languages before—I’m bilingual in Spanish and English and know enough French and sign language to get by—but for whatever reason computer languages have always seemed daunting.

That said, I have known for a while that I was ready to move out of education and put my skills to use in another field. I just wasn’t sure what field, or what skills I wanted to develop. Having been in education for such a long time, I realized I didn’t even know what jobs were out there that a person could do! For that matter, I definitely didn’t see how any of the skills I had as a teacher could help me in another field. (I will say, that if you are struggling with similar conundrums there is a significant community on LinkedIn of people who help teachers transition. I may write a comment below with their information if you’re looking to connect.)

What I did know is that having served in positions at the district level of 3 of the 5 biggest school districts in Texas that I had a lot to offer. I just wasn’t sure how to communicate that. I also didn’t know what additional skills I needed to develop or how to approach that development without going back to school.

And that’s an important distinction because with 3 Master’s degrees and finishing a PhD, I don’t necessarily want to go back to school to change careers. My comprehensive time in the classroom as a student spans decades. I am super competent at learning how to learn.

At first, I frantically applied to as many positions as I could. I knew that I was fully capable of doing the job, but my resume, skills and certifications didn’t necessarily reflect that. I did get feedback and interviews from a few companies, but in those cases, both I and the company determined together that, for various reasons, it wasn’t the best time to make the leap. I was excited, though, to get positive feedback and to be considered for those positions and to have opportunities to keep the lines of communication open if something came along at a better time.

In the meantime, I decided to take a breather. I went and looked at positions that I thought I would actually enjoy and saw what skills a person might need if they were interested in that job. Then, I determined which skills I could already quantify with my current resume, and which I needed to work on further. Because I am most interested in positions with a data analysis focus, I realized that learning Python would be a great way to be able to manage and collect data (among its many other uses!). So there I went: Into the Thick of It.

I’m working my way through a fantastic book/resource and I’m about a third of the way through. In the upcoming blog posts, I will discuss what skills I learned and how I can use those skills in my current context and how they might be useful in future endeavors!

Excited to share this journey with you!