Hi, and welcome to Teachers in Transition—the podcast for educators who are thinking about leaving the classroom, actively figuring out what comes next, or wondering whether there’s a version of their life where Sunday afternoon doesn’t come with a sense of impending doom. I’m Vanessa Jackson, and I help teachers recognize the value of everything they already know how to do—and figure out where those skills can take them next.
Last week, we looked at everything teaching asks of your brain, your body, and the rest of your life. This week, in Part II of our teacher health series, we’re asking the next question: What does all that accumulation cost? We’ll talk about the costs that are easy to miss while you’re busy making everything work. We have a teacher hack to save you time and stress in your week, and in our Career Transition and Job Search, we’ll look at the obstacle course of finding a new job and some aspects that are making it harder than they need to be.
Let’s get into it!
Perspective Pivot — The Cost (2:06)
Last week, we looked at the demands teaching places on a human being. The thinking, the emotional labor, the physical work, and all the ordinary tasks of being alive that still have to happen around it. We ended with a question: What does that accumulation cost?
That question is bigger than whether you come home tired. Of course you come home tired. You’ve been doing complicated work with actual human beings all day. The cost I’m asking about is what happens when each day asks for a little more than you have, and you keep finding a way to give it. Teachers are remarkably good at finding a way. You rearrange, improvise, stay late, take something home, and tell yourself you’ll catch up later. Then Later arrives carrying its own demands.
It’s the accumulation. An occasional stretch at 110 percent might be manageable. But when 110 percent becomes the new normal, you adapt to it. You stop being surprised by how much the day requires. Eventually, what once would have seemed like an absolutely bananas amount of demand becomes...Wednesday. Being able to do it, though, doesn’t mean it costs you nothing. Sometimes it means you’ve become so practiced at paying the cost that you no longer notice each transaction.
My favorite band has a line from one of their songs (link to the video in the show notes) that says
We will pay the price, but we will not count the cost" And that would echo in my head as I was pulling off something I didn't have the reserves for. )Put the big pot in the little one, pull a large rabbit from a small hat - pick your metaphor for accomplishing Herculean feats of something. That song was what I used to help pull me through. And now I realize it was supposed to be a bit more cautionary about the things we cannot get back.
One way to see that cost is to look at your margin. Margin is the space between what life requires from you and what you actually have available to give. It’s what absorbs ordinary life: the dog throws up, the car starts making a noise, your kid needs poster board tomorrow, somebody changes the schedule, or you sleep badly and still have to get up. With enough margin, those things are inconveniences. When you’re already operating at capacity, there is nowhere for the additional demand to go. Just like the coins that we pay for things in life, your margins can be measured in Time, Money, or Stress.
When your margin is gone, that's when one more perfectly reasonable email can make you furious. Deciding what to make for dinner requires the strategic planning normally reserved for amphibious military operations. You’re standing in front of the refrigerator looking at food you purchased yourself, and somehow it feels like someone has assigned you a group project, but didn't provide a group. The dinner question hasn’t become enormous. Your margin has become small.
And it can get smaller without a dramatic event to announce it. Maybe the gym bag stays in the car for three weeks. Maybe you grab whatever you can eat between responsibilities. Maybe you keep postponing a doctor’s appointment because finding the time, making the call, and dealing with whatever comes next all feel like separate jobs. Meanwhlie, you probably have some level of guilt attached to things because your school and all the internet gurus keep tell you to practice Self-care, but none of them have the practical suggestions for finding the margin to actually practice self-care. For the record, you have not failed some self-care test. It means that the rest of life is competing for a limited amount of you.
Before you can even THINK about margin, you have to go through recovery what life is hurling at you. There’s a term in occupational-health research called need for recovery: the need to recuperate after work has required effort from you. I find it useful because it asks a different question from “Are you off the clock?” You can leave school, pick up the kids, stop at the grocery store, make dinner, throw in laundry, answer the email you didn’t get to, and walk the dog. You may have stopped teaching hours ago. When, exactly, did you recover?
My watch has a feature that makes this distinction almost comically literal. After I work out—or after I spend an entire day jumping up and down on a parade float dressed as the Statue of Liberty—it tells me the next morning how many hours of recovery I still need. Not how long it has been since I stopped. How much recovery is still required from me. Apparently my watch understands something that we humans sometimes resist: finishing the activity and recovering from it are two different events. Adaptation is not the same as recovery. Not even close.
I think about that when teachers describe making it through the last three weeks before Christmas on sheer force of will. There are concerts and parties and grades and gifts and special schedules and children who have collectively decided that learning is over because Santa Claus exists. (and he does exist, I believe!) You make it to the last bell, and then you wake up on the first day of break sounding like a tuberculosis patient in a Victorian novel. Or spring break arrives and you can barely get off the couch. That doesn’t prove teaching caused whatever illness showed up. But many of us recognize the experience of holding everything together until there is finally room to notice how depleted we are.
It happens so often that getting sick on the first day of break can feel like a teacher holiday tradition. You’ve spent weeks holding everything rigidly in place, keeping all the balls in the air because concerts still have to happen, grades still have to be submitted, and people still need things from you. Then the last bell rings, you finally loosen your grip, and it all comes tumbling down. I’m also not suggesting that resting makes you sick or that determination can hold off a virus. I’m talking about that painfully familiar moment when you stop pushing through and finally feel how much it took. The break you were counting on begins with you in bed. And you probably feel guilty about that too.
And even a break may already have a job waiting for it. Saturday is when you do everything that teaching shoved out of Monday through Friday. Part of summer goes to appointments, house projects, family needs, and recovering from the year you just finished. You may have time away from school without having much unclaimed time. Then the next round of demands begins, and you’re asked to draw on a margin you never quite got to rebuild.
But recovery is only one part of the cost. I say this often in my coaching work: Every yes to one thing is a no to something else. That isn’t automatically bad. It's just physics. We all make choices with finite time and energy. The trouble comes when one part of life keeps collecting the yes by default. Yes to one more hour. Yes to the planning you’ll finish at home. Yes to giving a difficult day your patience, attention, and emotional energy. Yes to the part of your brain that is still thinking about tomorrow at nine o’clock even thought it’s 9:00 tonight. Yes to getting the job done no matter the cost.
Something else is on the receiving end of that No. Sometimes it’s exercise, or a hobby, or seeing friends. Sometimes it’s the invitation that sounded genuinely fun on Tuesday, but by Saturday you can’t imagine putting on real pants and interacting with humans. (seriously, let's normalize sweat pant parties). Sometimes it’s harder to identify, because you technically did the thing. You went to dinner. You took the vacation. You sat through the movie with your family. But some part of you was still at school, or simply had very little left. You may think you're covering things well. ehhhh.....
A few years ago, I was walking with my adult daughter when the subject of teaching came up. I told her that one reason I had stayed for 25 years was that I considered teaching a family-friendly career. And she stopped and she turned and looked at me with this absolutely shell-shocked expression on her face. She didn’t argue. She didn’t give me a list of grievances. She just slowly shook her head. And I remember thinking: Oh.
I understood why I had believed it. I had the school calendar. I had holidays. I had summers. When my children were out of school, often I was out of school too. Those things mattered to our family, and I’m not going to pretend they didn’t. But my daughter had been living in the same family and a different view of the terrain. She knew what it was like to have me home after a day at school. She knew which hours were available on the calendar and which hours I was actually available to her.
That look on her face has stayed with me because she wasn’t trying to make me feel guilty. She was telling me something I had missed while I was busy making the arrangement work. I had calculated what teaching allowed me to give my family. I had never completely calculated what teaching required my family to give up. Both sides of that ledger are real. I had been looking closely at one side and assuming it told the whole story.
For the record, I am not judging. Teachers do not need one more person telling them they aren’t doing enough for the people they love. I showed up for my family as best I can, and I know you show up for yours as best you can. You make dinner, remember birthdays, help with homework, attend concerts and the games, buy Christmas presents, and take the trip. The question is not whether those things count. Of course they count. Of COURSE they count! The question is how much of you was available when you got there, and what else you might have said yes to if you’d had more of yourself left to give.
Having available time and having yourself available are not necessarily the same thing. That can be difficult to see from the inside, especially when you’ve become very good at functioning while depleted. You can meet your obligations and still feel your world getting smaller. You can love your work and the people in it, and still recognize what it asks of the people waiting for you at home. Sometimes someone else can see that cost before you can. My daughter could. In second grade, my daughter discovered the Power of the Pen. She wrote my principal a letter asking him to let me have more time at home. He told me to tell her this is just how it is. Maybe that should have been a clue - I was too busy trying to prove myself at the time to realize it though.
We tend to look for dramatic evidence when we ask what a career has cost us. Did I get sick? Did I burn out? Did I reach some unmistakable moment when my body or my brain announced, “Absolutely not. We are closed”? Sometimes people do reach that point. I've heard those stories. But the cost can be quieter. It can be the margin that disappears a little bit at a time, the plans you keep declining, the care you keep postponing, or the parts of yourself that always receive whatever is left.
So perhaps the question isn’t only, “What has teaching done to my health?” It’s also, “What has it been costing me to keep doing this?” You may decide some of those costs are worth paying. You may decide others are not. But you deserve to see the whole ledger before you decide.
Teacher Hack: Let Somebody Else Walk those Grocery Aisles (15:09)
And now it’s time to move on to our teacher hack. Our teacher hacks are designed to save you in one of the three way we pay: time money of stress. For today’s Teacher Hack, I want to give you back some time, because time is one of the costs we’ve been talking about a lot today. Although this saves stress. How many of you use curbside grocery pickup? It is one of my biggest time savers. You can put in an order the day before, choose a pickup time on your way home from school (or delegate it to somebody else), and have somebody else walk all those aisles for you.
I do most of my shopping at my local grocery store, H-E-B. (I love H-E-B) There are trade-offs: I’m letting somebody else choose my avocados, and that can be dicey, and at my store, curbside prices run approximately five percent higher. For me, totally worth it. My husband and I used to laugh, back before inflation went wild, about walking into H-E-B for a few things and coming out having spent twice what we intended, because apparently everything we passed looked interesting. When I order from my list, the impulse purchases are not impulsing. So even with the extra cost, I often spend less. And as an introvert, I get to skip the person who stops their cart sideways in the middle of the aisle and makes it impossible for anyone to get around them. I also avoid the risk of losing my cool on that person because my margins are gone and I just can’t even anymore.
Here’s one more time saver: follow your store’s pickup check-in instructions. Some apps ask you to tap “I’m on my way” before you leave. I’ve seen workers say that giving the store a heads-up can make that handoff faster. I’ve also seen an anonymous post or two claiming that people who don’t tap the button get made to wait longer. I have no idea whether that’s true, but just in case - let them know you’re on your way. None of us have the time for silly games. Whether you’re already a curbside devotee or you’re trying it for the first time, the goal is simple: spend less of your limited time shopping for groceries. And if you’re already doing this, you get a gold star from me.
Career Transition And Job Search – The Obstacle Course (17:23)
And moving on to our Career Transition and job search segment. There is a particularly rude part of this conversation for teachers who have looked at that cost and decided, I don't want to keep paying this. Because deciding you need something different doesn't magically create the energy required to go find it. Congratulations: you have just added a job search to the job that's already exhausting you.
And the modern job search can feel less like a hunt and more like an obstacle course. You are trying to understand job descriptions written in a different professional dialect, tailor a résumé, figure out what an applicant tracking system may or may not be looking for, network with actual humans, prepare for interviews, and somehow keep doing your current job while all of this is happening. There may even be some mysterious match percentage standing between your application and a human being, and you usually don't know what the rules of that particular system are.
I saw a video recently that illustrated another part of this beautifully. A recruiter was looking at a résumé from someone applying for a corporate marketing role. The résumé had the right kinds of words on it, but something wasn't quite clicking. So the recruiter asked a friend for help. The friend asked someone with marketing experience. That person looked at the résumé, walked away, thought about it for a little bit, and eventually realized what she was seeing: this candidate appeared to have been an influencer doing influencer marketing and was talking in the style of an influencer. The experience was real. The skills might very well have been very relevant. But the person reading the résumé couldn't immediately tell what the experience meant.
I commented on that video (because of course I did) because there’s another side to the strange-sounding résumé. Applicants are trying to write for two audiences at once: the person they hope will read it and whatever screening or matching steps stand between them and that person. So they borrow language from the job description, trying to make sure their actual experience registers. Then a recruiter finally sees the résumé and thinks, Why does this sound like it was assembled by committee? I maintain that, “If we want better résumés, we need better job descriptions.” If the description is vague, stuffed with jargon, or asking for six different jobs in one person, applicants have to guess which parts matter the most and how they write the resume will reflect that.
Someone replied that the person doing the hiring may have no idea how much an applicant had to do just to get in front of them. They described researching a company’s hiring process, worrying about match percentages, and wondering whether a person would ever see the application. They also raised concerns about bias in the tools companies use. I don’t want to suggest there’s one magic match percentage that applies to every employer, but I absolutely recognized the experience they were describing. You’re trying to figure out the rules of a process you can’t see, while the person on the other end may not realize you had to navigate it at all. My final reply was, “It’s really more accurate to call it an obstacle course than a job hunt.” And teachers enter that obstacle course with one extra hurdle: explaining work that people outside education don’t know how to internalize.
Think about how much interpretive labor happened in the original story. A recruiter asked a friend, who asked another person, who studied the résumé, thought about it, decoded the professional language, and then sent the interpretation back. That candidate was fortunate enough to have a small investigative task force assemble around her résumé. You cannot build a job-search strategy that depends on that happening.
And teachers have exactly this problem. Your résumé says department chair. PLC lead. 504 coordinator. Grade-level team. Curriculum committee. You know exactly what those things required from you because you lived them. But the person hiring for a role outside education may have absolutely no idea what those words mean - or what skills are hiding underneath them.
That leads to one of the most important distinctions in a career transition: being qualified and being understood are not the same thing. You can have the experience. You can have the skills. You can even be an excellent match for the work. But if the person on the other side cannot recognize those things in the language you're using, your qualifications may never get the chance to matter.
This is why I talk so much about translation. Translation does not mean exaggerating your experience, and it definitely does not mean deciding that because you were a classroom teacher you should simply rename yourself a project manager. It means looking honestly at the project-management work you did as a teacher (and yes, you did it) and describing that work in language a project-management employer can understand.
And yes, that takes work. It is cognitively demanding work at exactly the point when a lot of teachers have very little cognitive margin left. Which is one reason I want you to separate two questions that can become tangled together during a transition: 1. Am I capable of doing work outside education? (spoiler alert: yes) and 2. Am I currently good at navigating this particular hiring process? (maybe? Maybe not?) Those are not the same question.
If you send applications into the void and hear nothing back, that can feel intensely personal. But sometimes the problem isn't your value. Sometimes the problem is that your value isn't understood yet. Sometimes you're using the wrong dialect. Sometimes you're learning the obstacle course while you're already tired.
That doesn't mean the obstacle course is impossible. It means we need to stop treating difficulty navigating it as proof that you don't belong on the other side. The work is to learn how to make your experience recognizable: to understand what employers are actually asking for, identify where your experience genuinely overlaps, and make that overlap easy to see without requiring a recruiter to call a friend who calls a friend who eventually figures out what you meant.
Because if you've already decided that teaching is costing more than you're willing to keep paying, the goal isn't to spend every remaining ounce of your margin trying to escape it. The goal is to use that margin strategically enough to build the next thing.
Closing (24:22)
Before we wrap up, if you’ve been asking yourself, “What has it been costing me to keep doing this?” you do not need to have an exit date or a perfect new job title before we talk. I offer different kinds of support for teachers at different stages of leaving the classroom. Maybe you’re still sorting out what you want. Maybe you know it’s time to make a plan. Or maybe you’re already applying and need help making your experience understandable to employers outside education.
You can book a free discovery call with me at TeachersinTransition.com/calendar. We’ll talk about where you are, what you need, and which option might fit. It’s a conversation, not a commitment to buy anything.
I also want to ask you to consider supporting this podcast. Teachers in Transition is independently produced - everything that happens here is done by yours truly. And if these conversations have helped you—or you believe other teachers need access to them - you can help me keep the show on the air! Listener support starts at three dollars a month, and the link is in the show notes. If contributing isn’t right for you, sharing an episode with a teacher who needs it also helps this resource reach the people it was made for.
Today, I hope you’ll give yourself permission to count the whole cost: the obvious parts and the quieter things that have been getting whatever is left of you. Seeing that cost clearly doesn’t require you to make a decision tonight. It gives you better information for whatever decision comes next.
Until next time, remember: you’re not starting over. You’re taking everything you’ve learned and built - and deciding where you want to take it next.
Connect with Vanessa Jackson
- 💌 Email: Vanessa@teachersintransition.com
- 📱 Call or Text: 512-640-9099
- 📅 Book a Free Discovery Call: teachersintransition.com/calendar
- 🧭 LinkedIn:
- 🔗 Bluesky: @beyondteaching.bsky.social
- 📸 Instagram & Threads: @teachers.in.transition
- 👍 Facebook: Teachers in Transition
- 🐦 X (Twitter): @EduExitStrategy
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The transcript to this podcast is found on the episode’s homepage at Buzzsprout
