Maybe I need to make a decision tree to help determine what path I should take with my career/life this coming year.
1) Make no changes. Keep same job, same house, same city, same friends, same free-time activities. Everything is actually going numbingly well - so why change?
2) Take the exciting teaching plunge.
Perhaps you see already which path I am inclined to take? I do yearn for a new exciting adventure...but at what cost?
I have a good job that pays me well. If I continue working at my current job for another year, I could potentially save $10,000+ which would create a huge financial safety net - something I do not currently have. After working in personal financial services for many years and having just recently dug myself out of debt, I don't take likely the importance of financial freedom.
I also live in a great house with a great roommate who has a great dog and who helps take care of my great cats and in the summer we lounge by our great backyard pool and throw great BBQs and did I mention I live in the great city of Los Angeles?
Yet, despite all of these great things I don't feel great. I don't feel passionate about these things (except for maybe the dog)... but I do feel attached to them. I am attached to my comfortable life. This attachment makes me nervous.
The same way I became nervous one day in college when I realized I really needed a cup of coffee in the morning. I hated the feeling so much that I immediately stopped drinking coffee and ever since I refuse to drink coffee on a daily basis for fear of needing it. Now I've come to fear that I'm addicted to my pleasant life and that if I don't immediately stop and change course I might get too comfortable and never do anything too challenging, too hard, or too great again.
So why teach? Why not change my life in some other significant way? I have read many accounts of others who have taken the plunge into teaching in a high-need public school describe and they generally describe the experience as exhausting, miserable, and frustrating. A few lucky ones also feel rewarded at the end of some days.
The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF) reported in 2003 that approximately a third of America’s new teachers leave teaching sometime during their first three years of teaching; almost half leave during the first five years. So why do it? Why leave my career to go into a profession that I may only survive in for a few years.
Well, mostly because I feel called to do it. I read an article about teaching, I read some shocking statistics about the state of education in America and I felt immediately drawn to do something about it. I feel like I may actually have something of value to offer students and I feel like it's time to focus on helping others after a long run of having the luxury of focusing my life on myself.
The first stage is the "Call the Adventure." The hero starts out in a mundane situation of normality from which some information is received that acts as a call to head off into the unknown.
The second stage is "Refusal of the Call." Often when the call is given, the future hero refuses to heed it. This may be from a sense of duty or obligation, fear, insecurity, a sense of inadequacy, or any of a range of reasons that work to hold the person in his or her current circumstances.
I'm not saying I'm a hero or a future hero. But I definitely feel like I'm at the "Refusal of the Call" stage. I'm making excuses to stay in my comfortable life and calling them rational arguments in defense of not going. While they may actually be rational, the point is not to think but to act. And I know that I must act...I just haven't committed to do so quite yet. Though the clock is ticking - I must decide within the next 3 weeks. I'm giving myself until April 15th.
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