Frayed at the Edges: Teaching, Burnout, and the Search for Something More

As COVID-19 crashed an already struggling educational system, I found myself caught in the middle of bureaucratic chaos, trying to support students while dealing with the challenges of online learning. This was me navigating a broken system, facing burnout, and then finding a new life abroad. This is about the realities I saw with my school, my school system and with my young students - and the difficult process of constantly discovering what it means to start over after leaving it all behind.

Teaching wasn’t easy in February of 2020 either.

On the day before the first day of school in 2019, I sat in a hot and crowded classroom with the entire staff of my new school packed into a classroom built to hold 20 students and usually held 30. It was hot and getting hotter by the moment. I knew no one here. I had moved schools to a new one after 14 years in the profession and the principal was hazing me like a new hire, so I moved to my final school in the same school year as Covid-19 hit.

After a few minutes, a woman maneuvered her way through the crowd to the front of the classroom, introduced herself to us as Ms. Taylor, our new principal. The previous principal came back on the first reporting day to quit.

Ms. Taylor then listed her resume of experience and her plans for the school. We got a bit about her values, which included the standard positive comments about young learners, teachers, etc. It was a well-prepared series of remarks that checked all of the boxes of what one might expect from an educational leader:

I am qualified.

I am experienced.

I will support you.

Nothing good will change.

Everything bad will change.

…and so on.

She delivered it with all the pauses and rhetorical flourishes that made it feel like we were being addressed by the very upper echelons of middle management.

It set an optimistic tone, and the staff was pleasantly abuzz with the prospect of change. It also helped that the principal she replaced—the one who hired me—had been absolutely draconian in her treatment of both students and staff, something I only discovered after I took the job.

This was the start of the 2019-2020 school year.

The school prided itself on helping the students who were struggling the most, but in a moment of naivety, I didn’t realize that this really meant just conditioning kids for the tests.

Mr. Taylor, though well-intentioned, was thrust into an impossible situation—starting her first year as a principal, right as COVID-19 turned everything upside down. The entire framework was crumbling, leaving everyone—students and staff alike—adrift.

When we were told on March 15, 2020, that New York City schools were closing due to COVID, the children had so many questions. “How long will we be closed?” “Will we have to wear masks when we come back?” “Is everyone going to get sick?” “What happens if someone in our class gets the virus?”  “Is everyone going to die?” Kids had more information from movies than anything else.

Kids told me that no one was letting them ask questions, so I did, but I’m not sure I was much help.

My answer to almost all of their questions was the same: “I don’t know.”

You probably know what came next—masks, social distancing, virtual classes. Teaching felt like trying to work in a fog. The few students who showed up online were confused, scared, and restless. We all were.

Six months later, New York City schools began a phased reopening in September. There was an effort to go back to school, back to normal, but by then, everything had changed. School was different—many students only came in part of the week and learned from home the rest of the time. Families had moved. We didn’t even know where some of the students were anymore.

The school itself felt different. Everyone had to wear masks, sit farther apart, and follow new rules. Sometimes schools had to close again if someone got sick. Everyone was going through the motions. It was impossible to know what was going on.

Bureaucracy isn’t just a French word

On top of the pandemic-induced chaos, I grappled with my own bureaucratic nightmare—a hiring error that put my job at risk. I’m still not entirely sure how it happened, but it boiled down to someone checking the wrong box on a form.

Being hired under the wrong license in the DOE meant my job was constantly at risk due to technicalities, forcing me to navigate a maze of bureaucratic red tape just to keep my position. The NYC Department of Education’s labyrinth of paperwork and regulations made every day a struggle to protect my job. The person who signed the paperwork wasn’t returning calls, the office downtown was working remotely. Getting one form fixed took weeks and month of chasing people and paperwork.

I’ve said it for years: when it comes to imagining the horrors of bureaucracy, Orwell and Kafka were just doodling. The NYCDOE has created one of the most bewildering systems  I’ve ever encountered. By comparison, navigating bureaucracy in France has been easier (I am not saying “easy”). There are things I went my entire career without fully understanding - and I’m pretty sure they were important things. God know what my retirement will look like. There’s little advice, no guidance, no coverage.

The only time I truly understood my healthcare options in my entire adult life was when a few friends and I formed a study group as teachers to make sense of it. We met like a book club for nearly two years.

The issue isn't the job or the kids; it's the system they operate within—a system that reflects society on a level, whether we admit it or not.

Education in America is a mess. People push for quick fixes and overhauls, forgetting that real learning takes years. Teaching is about planting seeds you might never see grow but trusting that they will. This is especially true in middle school.

The pressure was constant. Teachers sometimes act like it’s not a thing, but it is the air they breathe. I recall my assistant principal praising my teaching, only to quickly reprimand me for missing yet another data submission deadline—those colorful spreadsheets where my sections were often blank.

“We’re just documenting the good work you’re already doing,” she said, sounding like she was reciting it straight from a handbook or something she'd picked up in a principals' chat group for inspirational quotes.

I nodded, but inside I was screaming. One more task was one too many. I started avoiding her in the hallway—not because she wasn’t nice, but because it was the role she had to play.

By the time my principal was drilling me about that spreadsheet during my final Annual Review—our  “Performance Reflection and Growth Dialogue”—I had already checked out. Not just from the meeting, but from everything.

I was exhausted—so mentally drained that I didn’t even recognize it anymore. Exhaustion had become the norm. The endless assessments, paperwork, and grind wore me down. No matter how much I gave, it was never enough. I constantly felt like I was working on the wrong thing.

Situation Normal, Business as Usual

One of the last meaningful conversations I had at that school was with a fellow teacher who also seemed on the verge of burnout. She left for another school the year after I left. We had decided to meet up at lunch to fill in our respective colored sections of the spreadsheets

“What are we doing here?” she asked me one day. “I am making up numbers because I don’t understand the numbers. What do the numbers mean?”

She pointed to a spreadsheet of instructions that explained our colorful spreadsheet.

“Are we even teaching anymore?”

Again my answer to every question was “I don’t know.”

When the pandemic hit, all the flaws in the system were exposed—the inequities, inefficiencies, and absurdities were impossible to ignore. Meanwhile, my wife was at an elite private school with endless resources, where tuition was $40,000 a year, and they could have changed anything they wanted. Yet, they just reverted to the old ways. Both schools took pride in returning to "normal."

If I’m honest, I’d been barely holding it together as a teacher for years. I did some great work with the kids, but it was never acknowledged.

When I finally told my bosses I was quitting, it was after hanging on by a thread for too long. My wife and I were already planning our move to Portugal, but at that moment, I knew it was the right choice. It didn’t have to be Portugal, but it had to be somewhere else. It wasn’t just about escaping burnout—it was about moving toward something better.

Disorienting and then Reorienting Ourselves

To me, it all felt like sailing a boat on the ocean—you feel like you’re making progress, moving forward, but the whole ocean is going the opposite way, pushing against you, dragging you backward even when you think you're pointed in the right direction with the wind at your back.

Now, as we settle into life in France, we’re finally making our own choices. Leaving was just the first step. Moving abroad isn’t necessary for everyone, but for us, it was.

Here, I’ve realized that finding a new home isn’t about a perfect place; it’s about creating a space where we can thrive. It’s a process—sometimes messy, sometimes exhilarating—but it’s ours.

Our journey has been as much about letting go as learning a new way to live—releasing guilt, shedding expectations, and accepting that we don’t need to have everything figured out.

Hey! Thanks for reading!

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K