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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I teach in a very large school with several hundred staff members in the Midwest.  20 years ago, we almost never hired a first year teacher.  We didnt have to.  Only the very best, proven and experienced teachers were even had their resumes looked at.  Now? The teacher shortage is so bad, we're lucky to get more than a dozen applicants.  Most are first year teachers.
First years have a lot of energy and no skill.  They're like puppies.  Which would be okay except we've had so many quit mid year the last few years.    We've been teaching for 4 weeks.  In that time, despite a robust mentoring program, a fabulous admin team, and awesome students, we've had THREE first year teachers quit.  One quit after day 2!  And since we lost most of our subs, the rest of us are left to double up classes.  I have 45 kids in my AP bio class until or if we can find a replacement.  Kids are sitting on the floor (yes we are in person).  I am talking to our HR to see if we can put something in the contract to penalize people for breaking their contract.  I'm tired of 22 year olds, who think they're going to save the world, meeting real life teaching and, once they have a few tough days i a row, wussing out.  This job is hard.  Don't get a teaching degree if you can't handle a year or two of 80 hour weeks and most of those weeks sucking.  It takes that long for things to get better. [/quote]

Your school has been very lucky for many years.

I teach in a large mostly suburban district in the DMV. We experience this every year and have for the last twenty. Even in my cohort of career changers that came into the profession and my district in a program designed to place experts in their fields in teaching, it happened. We lost two teachers the first year. One in the first month.

October is a major shedding month. One of the veteran teachers at my last school used to warn the mentors to step up support in the last week of September even if our mentees didn’t outwardly appear to be struggling. She had a lot of theories why there was an October peak in loss of new teachers. I’ll share the two that I think are the most common:
1) the September shock wears off. In September, the brand new teacher learns what teaching is really like. And they most likely have never sat through as many useless meetings in their entire life. They are drowning and someone is talking about the cost of upgrading lifeboats we haven’t yet purchased. When they cry out for help, they are told to google swimming lessons. 
[b]2) in October usually (pre-Covid), new teachers go to their college or HS homecoming. They see their peers looking rested and hear stories of free evenings spent dating and socializing. They realize other 22/23 year olds are not killing themselves for $30k.[/b]

Layering Covid on top of everything else just adds to their disillusionment and stress.[/quote]

That is real.

I was 7/8th of the way through elementary ed certification in college and realized in fall of my senior year, as i watched my peers apply for jobs with consulting firms and in in the federal government, that I didn't want to spend my entire adult life in a classroom with children and not have colleagues who I could be an adult with. It was a shock to me because I had always wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, but I realized that I actually didn't...I just wanted to me a mom some day. I had another major so I dropped the ed, found my way to grad school soon, and worked in my field for 10 years and in a full-circle move I'm now a mom and a college professor in my chosen field. Makes sense, but I didn't see that coming at 20. Dropping K-12 education was one of the most self-aware, smartest decisions I made as a young adult. [/quote]

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