A new beginning

I resigned: Until recently, I thought I would teach for my entire career. I felt sad and defeated as I packed up my classroom, but I knew "it's about damn time."

Why? There's a lot of reasons, but a big one is- at some point I stopped getting to teach. More and more responsibilities were getting piled on me and my colleagues. Endless testing, data input, surveys, meetings, and trainings filled up my to do list. I didn't have time to plan or prepare for lessons. Instead everything was about completing a bottom line for someone, somewhere in an office that needed to have a meeting about it. Teachers have limited time without students during the day- I had 15 minutes before and after school daily, and less than 3 hours a week of planning time. To avoid working endlessly outside of work hours I had to cut corners on the very reason why I was at work: teaching.

I'm passionate about what I do, and at some point I realized the joy had been taken out of my job. I'm not so far in that I can quietly countdown the years til retirement- carrying on meant committing to this joyless busy work for 10-20 more years. I realized to survive I would have to stop caring... and how does that even work when you're in the business of caring?

So what's next?: Well... this- I'm going to be expanding Primary Focus into my full time business. Here's some things to look forward to:

⭐︎ More videos! If you have suggestions, I'd love to hear them (respond to this email!). My 3 main focuses are videos for parents/teachers to watch, videos to watch with kids, and videos with some "Perso-Natalie" that are about me 😉

⭐︎ Selling teaching resources on my blog & TeachersPayTeachers​

⭐︎ Expanding my blog and publishing on education websites

I'm planning a lot, but I'm also giving myself time to rest and reflect. It's heartbreaking to leave something I love so much, but I hope I can leave education better than I found it. You can hear my thoughts on it with my newest video here:

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Yours in education,

Natalie

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