Teaching Is Not a Job. It’s a Calling.
Teaching is a calling for many educators, but the phrase describes a personal relationship to the work, not a job description. A calling is why you stay through a hard year. A profession is what you're owed for the work: pay, training, and respect. Both can be true at once.
"What keeps you going? What encourages you? Why haven't you quit?"
I read those lines in a book entitled Leading with a Limp by Dan Allender and instantly underlined them. Not because I'm ready to turn in my keys, but because I know a lot of educators are. Especially teachers. Others are backing out even before they start. After chatting with a few universities about potential new hires, a common message emerged: newly graduated students are walking across the stage, receiving their hard-earned degree, then returning home with doubt, uncertainty, and plans to "take a year off" and see what happens.
Everyone seems to be wrestling with the same question: Is now really the best time to be a teacher?
For many of us, the past few years have been, without question, the hardest of our careers. Which is why articles such as "Are Teachers Ok? No, and Toxic Positivity Isn't Helping," by Julie Mason became an internet sensation. Because they hit a nerve. Because they express the heart of what many teachers feel but are unable to express: that they're tired, frustrated, and burnt out. That they're fed up and feel trapped. Which is exactly why I sent her article to my staff and asked for their feedback.
Unsurprisingly, they found it helpful and encouraging. Because it is, because she is absolutely right… The more we talked about it, though, we also discovered that she is also absolutely wrong.
And now, I'm going to ruffle a few feathers myself.
Teaching is not just a job, and we should never be okay with seeing it that way.
Like the men and women who willingly join the armed services during tumultuous times, the nurses and doctors who travel the world to provide aid to struggling countries and communities, or the cooks who bring their expertise to World Central Kitchen, a non-profit organization devoted to providing meals in the wake of natural disasters, teaching is not something you do to pay the bills or pass the time. It is not a job. It is a calling. It will periodically consume your life and almost always steal your thoughts. For as Thomas C. Murray writes in Personal and Authentic: Designing Learning Experiences That Impact a Lifetime, teachers are nearly the only people on the planet who "go to bed worrying about other people's children."
Outside of teaching content, teachers are tasked with guiding and counseling students about life and relationships, walking them through the past, present, and the future, and helping them make sense of their struggles, heartbreaks, joys, and celebrations. Teachers are asked to walk students through some of their most difficult years of life. Which is why, quite often, they are the greatest influence in a student's life.
And if that doesn't keep you up at night, staring into the darkness, if that doesn't inspire you to work late or rise early, if the weight of that responsibility doesn't terrify you to the point of exhaustion, then you should, just like Julie Mason suggests, walk away from this profession. Because teaching is not merely a job; it is a calling, a quest, and an opportunity to deeply impact lives.
It's just that, every now and then, after the new policy meeting, the alignment of curriculum meeting, the "gotta increase our test scores" meeting, and whatever-else-seems-important meeting, we lose sight of who we are and why we're here. Add a stretch like the pandemic years, which shifted the very core of our teaching experience and expectations, and we are suddenly miles away from where we hoped and wanted to be.
Sprinkle a healthy dose of toxic positivity on top of that, and suddenly educators are willing to walk away because teaching is no longer teaching. It's survival.
For every educator counting down to the next break and waiting on a collective sigh of relief, I would like to offer three pieces of advice that, I hope, will bring comfort to your heart and confidence to your mind that you are exactly where you need to be, doing exactly what you need to do. Teaching.
Be Hopeful, Not Optimistic
Toxic positivity, as that We Are Teachers article puts it, is what happens when we "focus on the positive and reject, deny, or displace the negative." From the outside, it can pass for optimism. What it actually does is turn up the volume on the feelings it was supposed to quiet.
James Stockdale, a United States Navy admiral, aviator, and POW survivor, would agree.
Stockdale spent close to eight years in a North Vietnamese prison camp. When Jim Collins interviewed him for Good to Great, the book that gave the idea its name, Stockdale said he had never once lost faith in how the story would end. He never doubted he would get out, and he expected to turn the whole ordeal into the defining event of his life.
Who didn't prevail? The optimist. Asked by Collins who hadn't made it out, Stockdale answered without hesitating that it was the optimists. They were the ones who kept saying they would be home by Christmas, and then by Easter, and then by Thanksgiving, and then by Christmas again. Stockdale said they died of heartbreak, and he treated it as a lesson that mattered enormously.
Stockdale's rule was never to confuse "faith that you will prevail in the end," which you can never afford to give up, with the discipline it takes to look squarely at how bad things actually are right now.
What is your current reality? What is your pain and frustration? Whatever they are, don't sugarcoat them. Absorb them. Call them by name. Then, with as much grace and kindness as you can muster, confront those who can solve them. Be it your boss, a colleague, or yourself, for that is how we change our current plight: by being honest and active.
Toxic positivity rejects or denies our true reality. It focuses on the false positives and ignores the negative.
Hope acknowledges our true condition and confronts it. It absorbs the pain, yet it insists that we will prevail. It turns our current realities into defining moments of our lives. It is hard-won. And it is worth it.
As you prepare for the back half of the school year, hold onto hope, prevail, and turn this stretch into a defining moment of your life. Your students are watching. And they are learning.
Remember, You Enjoy This
Admittedly, I find inspiration in strange places. One of my recent favorites is from an Australian named Beau Miles.
In one of his films, Junk Cabin: Secretly building my wife a COVID office, Beau catches himself mid-project and has to remind himself that he actually enjoys the work. Building is a process, and not every project has to be a race to the last nail.
Sometimes - oftentimes - education seems like a sprint from one finish line (break) to the next. Christmas break, spring break, and summer break can never come soon enough.
Beau's words are a kind reminder to stop merely "building things" and embrace these moments. Even when it's hard - or especially when it's hard - we must find times and moments and reasons to enjoy this great profession because these are the days that we'll look back on and our students will email or write us about. These are the defining moments of our lives. How we choose to live them will determine how we remember them.
As a good friend of mine recently wrote, walking through his wife's cancer and treatment taught them both to "focus on the moment." Otherwise, he said, fear and angst and worry about the future take everything. The present became a more peaceful, relational, and God-focused place for them.
As educators, we can choose to focus on the fears of what could happen, the reasons why we're bummed or frustrated with how the year is progressing, and consume ourselves with the mountain of problems before us. Or, like Beau, we can remind ourselves that at the heart of all that we are doing, we get to teach, we get to work with students, and we still get to have a voice.
So enjoy the process and focus on the moments you have with students. Those moments may be smaller, erratic, or look radically different than they have in years past, but they are still there. Find them, cling to them, and enjoy them. For they are why you became a teacher.
Stay Steady. You're Planting Irises.
In his memoir Downhill All the Way, Leonard Woolf (Virginia Woolf's husband) described the last summer before the war as the most terrible months of his life. He spent it listening on the wireless to Hitler's speeches, which he heard as the ravings of a vindictive underdog who had suddenly discovered he was all-powerful. One afternoon in the orchard at Rodmell he was planting iris reticulata under an apple tree when Virginia called out from the sitting room window that Hitler was making a speech. He shouted back that he wasn't coming. He was planting iris, and those flowers would outlast Hitler. Twenty-one years after Hitler died in the bunker, Woolf wrote, a few of those violet flowers still came up under that apple tree.
Walt Whitman famously came to a similar conclusion when he pondered what to do "amidst endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill'd with the foolish."
His answer. "That you are here. That life exists. And identity. That the powerful play goes on and we may contribute a verse."
At some point, this defining moment of our lives will come to an end. Before it does, however, we have the unique gift of walking our kiddos through it, of planting irises of decency, resolve, and hope. A hard stretch in this profession carries an opportunity inside it: teaching our students the most important lesson of their lives, how to be a human.
Those three questions again. The answer: hope, joy, and irises. Because teaching is not a job, it's a calling. And now, more than ever, is the time to answer it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is teaching a calling or a job?
It can be both, and the two words answer different questions. A calling describes why someone stays in a classroom through a year that gives them very little back. A job describes the terms of employment: the contract, the hours, the salary schedule, the license renewal. Teachers who describe the work as a calling are usually talking about motivation, not compensation.
What's the difference between a calling, a profession, and a vocation?
A calling is internal. It's the sense that this particular work is the work you're supposed to be doing. A profession is external and structural. Public-school teaching generally requires state licensure or certification, with requirements varying by state, alongside specialized training and accountability to standards. Not every teaching role carries a state-issued credential. Vocation sits between the two, and in its older religious sense it's close to a synonym for calling. Teaching qualifies as a profession on the structural test. Whether it's a calling is a question only the individual teacher can answer.
Does describing teaching as a calling make it easier to underpay teachers?
That's a real objection, and it deserves a straight answer. Critics argue that calling language sets up an expectation of sacrifice, that a teacher who has answered a call is supposed to accept unpaid hours, personal spending on classroom supplies, and salaries below what comparable credentials earn elsewhere. Some teachers reject the phrase entirely for that reason, and argue it diminishes the training and skill the work actually requires. The counter-argument is that motivation and compensation are separate questions, and that a person can find deep meaning in work while insisting on being paid properly for it. Both positions are held by working teachers.
How many teachers actually leave the profession each year?
The most recent national figures come from the National Center for Education Statistics, covering the move from the 2020-21 to the 2021-22 school year. About 84% of public school teachers stayed at the same school, 8% moved to a different school, and 8% left teaching altogether. That works out to roughly one in twelve public school teachers leaving in a year. NCES found those rates were not measurably different from 2012-13. The doubt teachers describe is widespread and real. A sudden collapse in the workforce is not what the national numbers show.
How do you know if teaching is your calling?
There's no test for it. The practical version of the question is whether the weight of the responsibility pulls you toward the work or away from it. If the thought of being the most consistent adult in a struggling student's year makes you want to get better at the job, that's your answer. If it mostly produces dread, that's an answer too, and an honest one worth acting on.
- Calling and profession aren't opposites - one describes why a teacher stays, the other describes the training, credential, and pay the work requires.
- Hope isn't optimism - optimism waits for the situation to improve, while hope names the reality honestly and still expects to come through it.
- The exploitation critique is worth taking seriously - calling language can be used to justify unpaid labor, and rejecting that use doesn't require rejecting the meaning teachers find in the work.
- Attrition is real but not a collapse - NCES puts annual departures from public school teaching at about 8%, a rate it found statistically unchanged from a decade earlier.
- The work outlasts the hard stretch - what a teacher plants in a difficult year keeps flowering long after the conditions that made it difficult are gone.
Teachers who stay often reach a point where the next step means more credentialing: a master's, an added endorsement, or an administrative license. The sponsored programs on this page are worth a look if you're weighing what that next credential would involve.
You can connect with Brian on Twitter at @miller_brian_
- Five Ways for You and Your School to Thrive This Year - August 30, 2021
- Is a Teaching Degree Worth It? Cost vs. Salary 2026 - July 14, 2021
- Teaching Is Not a Job. It’s a Calling. - January 6, 2021
