Matthew Gray taught French immersion for nearly five years at a Calgary junior high school.
In his fourth year of teaching, Gray changed the trajectory of his career and enrolled in law school at the University of Calgary.
“COVID hit, and I’m here sitting looking at blank screens because I couldn’t ask any of the students to turn them on,” said Gray, who is now articling at Calgary law firm. “And something just was kind of like, `Why not?'”
“I found something that I thought I might be able to apply a lot of the skills that I have in a different way that I thought was interesting.”
Gray’s experience is hardly uncommon for teachers in the early stages of their career. According to the Alberta Teachers Association (ATA), about 50 per cent of teachers leave the profession within the first five years.
“This is a crisis in public education right now,” says Jason Schilling, president of the ATA. “We need to address working conditions and students’ learning conditions, so that teachers will want to stay in the profession and choose not to leave.”
Schilling fears for teachers who bear the brunt of a demanding workload, burnout and a lack of resources to meet student needs.
“This government is failing a generation of students right now,” he says.
According to the ATA, Alberta ranks last in public education spending per student in Canada.
“That’s why we’re seeing such large class sizes right now,” Schilling says. “That’s why we’re seeing the lack of resources – the fact that boards don’t have the funding that they used to have.”
Mid-career teachers are more likely to be affected by workplace conditions, says Astrid Kendrick, a researcher at the University of Calgary. They’re impacted by burnout, exhaustion, worsening mental health and moral distress more than early-career teachers.
“There needs to be a just a stronger emphasis on how folks in the middle of their career are doing,” said Kendrick, an assistant professor at the U of C’s Werklund School of Education. “It’s those middle ones that are struggling more.”
A former public school teacher herself, Kendrick taught for nearly 20 years at public schools in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Through managing demanding expectations, an ever-increasing workload and a lack of resources, her research reflects her own experience.
“I’ve never stopped loving teaching,” she says. “I just kind of came to a point where I knew it was time for me to do something else.
“That’s part of the reason I can understand why those mid-career teachers start looking for something else – because that’s sort of what happened to me, too.”
Brendan Hagan, who runs the band program at a public high school in Calgary, wonders if teaching is a “young-person’s sport.”
“I don’t think there’s any understanding of how much we’re doing,” he says. “You don’t have to look hard to find the reasons to push yourself out the door. And I don’t want that. I really love what I do, but it’s clouded by every other thing now.”
Hagan finds himself at school late in the evening and on many weekends to manage the increasing workload.
“When you have people who loved it who just think, `I can’t do this because it’s costing me too much of my own well-being,’ — that’s not good,” he says.
Many new teachers enter the profession with an “idealistic thought to it,” says Schilling. In time, however, the difficult realities of the classroom set in.
“Our younger teachers are saying, ‘This isn’t what I signed up for. This isn’t what I want to do now,”” he says. “And they will choose to go elsewhere,
In Gray’s mind, teaching is a profession that is often misunderstood.
“Finding a way for us as a society to actually extend some kind of support in a more concrete way to teachers, I think, is something that would actually change the outcomes for people leaving the profession so early,” he said. “I loved the time that I was teaching…I would love to go back to it at some point.
“I’m really happy with where I am at the moment, about how things turned out.”
