[jonbrennecke]

My wife is in a similar situation. She's a middle-school teacher at a public school in a state that doesn't value public education. While she still loves teaching, her experience mirrors your's in regards to overwork, attrition, etc. For a job that should get off at 3pm, she routinely works all evening on grading, lesson planning and other admin tasks.

We also live in an area where teachers are poorly compensated relative to the cost of living. I'm well paid as a software engineer, which just makes her feel worse about the value of her career in teaching when she works longer hours than I do.

We've talked about her leaving teaching at the end of the school year with the plan to get her PhD so she can teach at a college level.

[brimble]

Damn, how many of us are there?

I'm trying to get mine to switch to project or product management because she'd be awesome at it and has, for years, kept taking on big projects at schools she's worked at (think: leading teams to create and implement new educational systems from scratch, running various extracurriculars, et c) and basically doing one or both of those roles, with great success, while enjoying it. I'm like "you could have half the stress and double or more the pay". She's semi-open to it and I'm continuing to wear her down, but she's likely not going back to teaching next year regardless (may just take a year off—the last four or five years have been really rough)

[joshmlewis]

Same boat here! My wife is leaving her virtual K5 teacher job when school is over in June. She just got her masters in instructional design and has been looking at roles like what has been discussed in this thread.

[shaftway]

This was us 8 years ago. My wife has extra education for special needs kids, and after some bad deals with her school she opened her own business doing in-home services for kids.

Now she's totally burnt out on that, and I'm advocating those roles for her (after a multi-month sabbatical).

[bluesroo]

Wow, that sounds like a carbon copy of the conversation we’ve been having my household.

Good luck to you guys

[bluesroo]

It's pretty crazy. My wife went the grad school route on the way here, not sure there's any willpower left for more of it haha. Good luck to you guys

[jonbrennecke]

Yeah my wife is a math teacher, and getting a PhD in Math is no joke. I honestly have no idea what this process will look like. But we don't have kids yet so it's now or never to make big life changes haha

[BadCookie]

A more likely path would be getting a doctorate in education or math education, but I’m not sure whether either of those would be helpful to her.

[wbsss4412]

Yeah that would be quite the achievement.

The distance between math teacher and math professor is vast.