Ep 1. From Teacher to UX: Why I Quit Teaching After 15 Years

Have you ever felt the weariness of a path once walked with vigor? In this episode, I unveil the raw and moving saga of a career that once was my identity. Embrace the narrative of my quest to reimagine my future, as we journey through triumphs and trials, from teaching accolades to the brink of burnout. My story is not just one of personal transformation, but a beacon for all who've felt the sting of a profession's unrelenting demands and yearn for the courage to seek a new direction.

Here is an episode that doesn't just share a story—it invites you to reflect on your own, encouraging educators everywhere to recognize their worth and the vast horizons awaiting beyond the classroom walls. 

If you've ever felt the pull towards reinvention or pondered the transferable wealth of your professional expertise, this episode promises a beacon of inspiration and a blueprint for your own potential pivot.

Resources:

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Transcript

Narrator: 0:01

Welcome to the UX Teacher Prep podcast, the ultimate destination for educators who aspire to break into the field of user experience and product design. Your host, z Arnold, a 15-year teacher turned UX researcher, is here to guide, coach and mentor you through every twist and turn as you make your career transition into tech. If you're ready for a more satisfying career and lifestyle and you want the balance to unleash your creativity, this podcast is for you. Now for the show.

Zee: 0:30

Hello teacher friends, Coach Zee, here Today we're going to talk about my transition from teaching to UX research. So I want to preface this story by saying a disclaimer. This is my experience, my story going from teacher to tech. I started as an English teacher, I was teaching for 15 years and I transitioned into an edtech space where I'm a user experience researcher. I really want to share this story because I know there are some teachers out there that may resonate with some parts of my story or may have a teacher friend who resonates with some part of my story, and I think it's important to let everyone know that it's okay to change your mind and it's okay to branch out and try different things in your career. So I'll start from the beginning.

Zee: 1:16

Ever since I was four years old, I wanted to become a teacher. I remember lining up my teddy bears and my dolls and wanting to play school when everyone wanted to play house and cops and robbers and different other games. I remember always wanting to play school and I also remember that if I was not allowed to be the teacher, I would not play, and it was from there that I knew that I was passionate about teaching and learning, and even as I went through school, elementary school, middle school I admired my teachers and I really did well in school. I did well academically, especially in English class. I got really good grades. I got 90s hundreds. I was great with reading. I was great with writing. That's when my teachers told me and that's what I believed. And so eventually I went to college to study teaching and I ended up applying for the New York City Teaching Fellows Program. That's how I became a teacher and so once I started teaching I knew it was my thing. They say after five years of teaching you know if you really want to stay in teaching. But I feel like at the three year mark I was really in my groove and I knew that teaching was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. And it even got to the point where I was a New York City Teaching Fellows Ambassador.

Zee: 2:24

I was recruiting teachers to join teaching. I was recruiting teachers to come into the classroom. I went on to be a lead teacher, a dean. I got my administrative license to be an assistant principal. I was coaching teachers. I was coaching coaches. I was the director of a training academy during the summer where teachers came in to learn about teaching. I mean, teaching was my life Morning, noon and night, during the school year and during the summer and I continued to teach, and I taught up to my 15th year of teaching.

Zee: 2:54

So you're probably wondering how I became a user experience researcher and what changed? Well, a few things changed. One thing everyone knows is that you're not a teacher if you don't experience burnout, and so being an English teacher was stressful at times because I would literally have to take my work with me everywhere I went. I had about 90 to 100 students at any given time, and so I was always grading essays, I was grading homework, I was lesson planning and preparing for my students and, as you know, with it being a teacher, you don't have enough time during the school day because of meetings and prep periods and all the other things that happened during the day, where you don't really have the time to plan and grade papers and such. So, over time, I became more and more burnt out and I also felt like I wasn't getting enough support from certain people that should have been supporting me, not getting enough support from administration, and, you know, I felt like they wanted more and more, but they weren't preparing the teachers for what they wanted right. So we had to kind of figure things out on our own, and that was challenging as well, like I'm a very resourceful person, but it was challenging to be able to jump from here to there and not have that support when trying to figure things out. So I'm not gonna lie, I definitely had one principal that was super amazing and was super supportive and really prepared us and gave us the right materials and the right professional development and professional learning that we needed to survive as teachers.

Zee: 4:20

But over time, you know, my life changed in terms of, you know, having more children and getting married, and so I was at the point where I had to start to balance teaching and my personal life and my health and being so burnt out over time I started to gain weight, my health started to deteriorate, I started to get anxiety over, like observations and different things that were happening in the classroom and in schools in general just that burden of having to deal with the stress that comes with teaching and teaching middle school students, where there's a lot going on in their personal lives, right, and we take that home with us sometimes, and so all the things that teachers talk about, even now, you know, dealing with health issues, dealing with some of the students that are just unmanageable at times with their behavior, right, not having support from parents to bureaucracy of teaching, all those things. So, to sum everything up, teaching just became no longer sustainable. We weren't getting the proper recognition for the work that we were doing as a whole as educators. Leaders lacked empathy and didn't want to make the necessary shifts to support teachers' mental health. There was lack of work-life balance and I saw an opportunity where I could continue to serve in the education space and impact more teachers and students and on top of that, I could work more with technology, which I love.

Zee: 5:35

And the funny thing about UX, the funny thing about my new career in UX, is that I was actually looking for a way right after the pandemic hit. We were remote teaching from home and I was trying to find a way to get my students better engaged because they would come into the Zoom and they would have their cameras off most of the time and I would say the expectation is for your camera to be on, because we're not together in person anymore and I really want to see what everyone looks like and make this as much a real classroom as possible, but of course, you know, students will be students and that was very difficult to get them to turn their cameras on, and I was just trying to find ways to engage students and I stumbled across user experience, design and education and I was amazed. I was amazed at the things I was learning. I was amazed at how they were talking about just the user experience for students as they're using like tech, apps and technology and things online, and I know that we had to start using a lot of different apps with our students because we were remote. Good thing, I was tech savvy already, but a lot of teachers had struggles with that as well. So I just started going down this rabbit hole of learning about UX in education and I thought this is something that I might actually be interested in doing.

Zee: 6:47

You know, now, just to take a step back, there have been times in the past where I said you know what I need to stop teaching. This is getting to be overwhelming, this is getting to be too much. But I really didn't have the time, space or resources to make that transition and I'm definitely going to talk about those resources in another episode. But I feel like the pandemic was a time when a lot of people had time to really think and reflect on their life and think about what their next steps would be, and that's where I got the time and space to even discover UX. So I started looking into UX writing.

Zee: 7:20

That was the first thing that came to me, because I found out that user experience had different parts UX design, ux research, ux writing. And so, being the English teacher that I was, I figured you know UX writing would be great for me, because I love writing, I love everything I have to do with writing, and so user experience writing, which has to do with designing the actual writing that's on websites, in terms of the buttons that people click when they visit websites, and things of that nature that seemed really exciting to me. I was like, wow, there's people behind this, there's a person behind deciding what word goes on that button, and so throughout that whole process of studying UX, I really decided that it was time for me to make a greater impact on education and, at the same time, have a more balanced life. So I knew that I definitely wanted to stay in education.

Zee: 8:06

As I transitioned out of teaching, I knew that I wanted to be at an educational company because I'm still passionate about education and I always want to be in that space where I can support teachers and students, and so I decided that I wanted to pursue that and I was starting to interview and look for jobs and user experience in the ed tech space. Edtech stands for educational technology, if you don't know. So those are some of the reasons why I transitioned out of teaching, but what I really want to say in this episode is the decision is up to every individual. For me, I felt like it was the right decision at the right time. Yes, I miss my students sometimes, even though they've gone on to high school and greater things in life. The funny thing is that my students encouraged me to take that leap and try something different, so they were actually a part of the process, and I'm forever grateful for that, because my students saw what I was going through and they saw how I was trying to balance my teaching life and my personal life and all the things that were going on in the school building. They were really rooting for me. Miss Arnold, you can do this, we got you, we got your back, and that felt really good.

Zee: 9:09

So the decision is up to every individual teacher and there are many paths you can take.

Zee: 9:14

You can stay in teaching, go to another school, go to another district, or even stop teaching and go and do something else, but still stay in education. There are so many opportunities and possibilities, and teachers have so many transferable skills that they can transfer to any field. That ability to teach and that ability to train others is needed in so many different organizations right now, and so, as we go through these episodes and these seasons, I'm really going to be digging deeper into what your future career could look like, and I'll be bringing some people on to show you what that could look like. I really hope that something resonated with you and that you can start to see yourself in a different space, if that's what you so desire. If you're listening to this, most likely you've already decided that you want to transition out of teaching, and if you're interested in UX, I'd love to work with you. You can check out my one-on-one coaching services over on my website, uxteacherprepcom, and I wish you all the best on your next move.

Narrator: 10:12

Thanks so much for tuning in. If you liked this podcast, hit, follow and scroll down to leave a five-star rating and share it with a friend. If you're looking for resources to help you on your tech transition journey, head over to uxteacherprepcom. Follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram at uxteacherprep for daily tips and motivation. Have a topic you'd like to hear addressed on the show? Send us a DM on Instagram. If you're listening on YouTube, like subscribe and share. Until next time, be well.