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.