I’m Selling Out

I have been working as a special education teacher in an urban school district for the last six years. I have helped many students graduate who are on the edge of passing and failing and helped many students grow multiple grade levels in one year. I have not been as successful with every student. I have not been the best at managing every student’s behavior, and not every student in my classroom made significant gains.

In my first year of teaching, a student put me in a headlock, another student closed a door on my hand, and my phone was also stolen, but still I persisted in making a difference and just got tougher as a teacher so these events would never happen again if that’s any testament to my commitment as an educator.

Since then, the results have been much better for my students, but I still look back and see the students I taught that have dropped out, the students who, despite interventions, keep getting suspended and seem to make no behavioral progress. I have been widely recognized in meetings and staff meetings for my devotion and willingness to always go above and beyond, and although I did move to a more office role in holding IEP meetings and ensuring procedural requirements with special education were met in the last three years, my role still requires pulling students out of classes and servicing them in specialized instruction needs.

Now, I am selling out. The past three years, outside of my professional role, I also attended law school at night, with many days being either at work or law school from 7 a.m. to 9 or 10 p.m. While I initially went in to continue in public service and in special education, I was exposed to many different areas of the law I became interested in, like torts, constitutional law, and all of my health law electives. Now, I am going into big law.

I wanted to pursue big law because I would find the work complex, dynamic, and exciting, and that’s not a lie. I am not lying to people that I do enjoy writing memos, briefs, and doing legal research, and improving my legal writing ability. I am not lying when I say I enjoy working with and collaborating with attorneys in a legal environment much more than I do in teaching when I have to show older colleagues how to ctrl+F a spreadsheet. I am not lying when I say I do genuinely enjoy hunting for answers and advising on issues related to corporate litigation, like breach of fiduciary duty claims or disputes about international arbitration agreements or procedural matters like discovery and motions to dismiss. I wrote a writing sample on the enforceability of an international arbitration company between two companies located in different countries. If this all sounds like esoteric lawyer-speak, it’s also esoteric lawyer-speak to me. I had no idea what I was doing and had to spend several hours researching an issue I had no familiarity with, and was told by the evaluator that I scored very high on that writing sample, which is a surprise to me.

But it was very substantial validation to know that even when I lack confidence in myself and perceive my performance to be lesser than it needs to be, that’s not how it looks to an outside observer. It was some reassurance that I need to carry and compose myself with more confidence and less self-doubt, because I realize a lot of people around me who don’t perform as well can impress more just by virtue of projecting more confidence. It sounds nerdy, but I do enjoy work related to big law and have the work ethic, adaptability, and resilience to think I’ll be really good at it and I would solve a lot of problems I wouldn’t know the answer to.

But of course money is a consideration and me and my wife’s financial future is also a major consideration. It would be disingenuous to say it wasn’t. I’m not sure what kinds of clients I’ll have, but I’m sure it’s a very different experience than working in education and perhaps it can’t always be construed as making the world a better place like teaching is largely seen as. I did also explore other legal jobs, like the government, boutique law firms, public interest options like school systems, and the military (the Marine Judge Advocate Corps). The general rule of the legal job I would pursue was that it had to be what I saw as an upgrade. For example, I did not go to law school to make less money than what I make now.

But I felt like government jobs were not the best option in this administration, and I took several factors into consideration when choosing to stay a civilian over going into the Marines. As an aside, if I didn’t get this big law job, I would have become a Marine attorney. It was funny because I always got some reaction from people that highlighted how that person felt about the military —while some people, particularly those in the military, said some version of “hell yeah!”, my mom implored me not to because she worried I would get killed, and one friend told me “you have all this education and you want to be a Marine?” Likewise, not everyone I talked to was super supportive of this drastic career and life choice because they thought there were better options. One friend directly told me “you can do a lot better than the Marines.”

I was actually pretty far along in the process, and I really liked everyone I interacted with in the Marines Corps and the Marine Judge Advocate Corps. They were unapologetically intense and had a culture that reminded me of being an athlete on a cross country team again. Unlike most people in the legal profession I’ve interacted with, I didn’t feel like I had to be quite as reserved and sometimes guarded as I have to be in traditional lawyer circles. They had their own code and lingo and I started to get used to people signing off emails and texts with “Semper Fi.” It was the first professional experience I’ve ever had where I was more desirable for my physical abilities over my professional and academic abilities (I run marathons). I ran the Marines Physical Fitness Test and scored a 283, which is 17 points off a perfect score, only falling short because I couldn’t do five extra pullups with perfect Marine form. I ran the 3-mile run of the Physical Fitness Test in a 15:56. I definitely felt very flattered and treated very well by my recruiters, but I guess that was their job.

If there was one reason I chose big law over the Marines, it wasn’t anything overly complicated. While the Marines was the more exciting and drastic career change, I chose big law because one option had better material circumstances for the future than the other. The Marines could offer a lot of long-term stability, paid-for housing, and great benefits. But the big law job would pay a lot more over a long period of time, and it wouldn’t require moving all the time. Yes, I chose big law over the Marines because of the money.

There is part of me that thinks I have put in my time to a more altruistic cause in public service. I have put in six years, and no, I did not spend my whole life in the field or spend 45 years as a teacher like some people. But I had plenty of times I thought I would quit when I didn’t. It was multiple times over my first year when I felt like I would have been less stressed doing anything else.

I do look at my friends from college sometimes to rationalize my selling out. Most of them, needless to say, did not go into the most altruistic professions or public service. Because my undergraduate program had a robust pre-medical program and business school, a lot of people became business analysts and consultants. Many are becoming doctors. Others became lawyers and others are pursuing their PhDs.

The majority of my friends had zero qualms about selling out, and I don’t think they’re bad people at all for it — we all went to college so we could ensure material success. I can count one or two people I know who graduated my year, taught in a Teach for America like program or environment like myself, which has a two year commitment to teaching, and are still teaching. Still, I like to think of myself as better in terms of trying to make an impact and not selling out, but now I am no better than the rest.

But I am also faced with real-life realities. I have over $100,000 in student loans I have accrued to pay off my undergrad and law school. My wife and I have a mortgage to pay that is increasingly difficult on teacher salaries with increased cost of living. Yes, I could pay off those loans with public service loan forgiveness, but I would still need to make several years of payments and am a bit distrustful of whether that public service loan forgiveness will truly hold under this presidential administration.

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I have also become far less idealistic about the world changing I thought I would be making in teaching. I’ve made an impact in some cases, but it’s not like I have worked magic. I have not willed kids to come to school who didn’t despite various interventions and efforts from myself and my colleagues. I have seen more kids than I would have liked drop out of school. I can’t count how many times I’ve felt like we’ve worked very hard to only not see results from that hard work, as teaching can be a profession where many factors are outside the locus of control. I can tell a story of the many lives I’ve impacted. I can also tell a story of all the lives where I seem to have made no impact or was just another part of a system that failed the child. There are people who are great at that self-promotional aspect of the job, and I tend not to be one of them.

Thus, there is a part of me that is secretly happy about this career change. There is much of success in teaching that is the story we tell and can largely be subjective in the eye of the beholder. I know every teacher knows what I’m talking about when I say one evaluator can see your lesson and think it was the best lesson in the world, while another can see it and tell you it was a terrible lesson. As a law student, I have encountered far less of this subjectivity in grading. Either the memo was structurally sound, or it wasn’t. Either you did well on an exam, or you didn’t. It’s not like that defines you, but I do feel like I don’t always have to worry about not stepping on people’s toes or making sure I stay on everyone’s good side in the law as I have in teaching.

Teaching, I think, will have always been the hardest thing I’ve always done. There is an emotional stress that is very draining that is hard to describe to people that aren’t in the profession. Beyond the things that happened my first year of teaching, I will also always remember the time I let a kid take a phone call in my class, and he had learned his mother had passed away. Part of me just struggles to handle the emotional weight of situations like that on a day in, day out basis. In the past two weeks, I intervened in two hallway altercations. It’s not my role and I generally make it a rule not to given the liability involved, as many teachers could tell you, but I did instinctually feel that someone could get seriously hurt if I was one of the closest adults there and didn’t immediately intervene and/or call for help.

I am under no illusions that working in big law won’t carry a lot worse work-life balance than teaching with summers off. But there is a big difference between the intellectual, administrative exercises of legal practice versus the emotionally draining, very stressful parts of being a teacher. I would take a 12 hour work day doing legal research over being put in a headlock or being called homophobic slurs by a kid any day of the week.

I will always remember, during my first year of teaching, a comment my colleague had made about another one of my first year teaching colleagues. The person had gone to an Ivy League school, a better school than mine. The person making the comment had grown up in Baltimore, gone to school in Baltimore, and spent all his life there, initially struggling to make a career out of teaching but eventually finding stability in it. He said, “they went to an Ivy League school to become a teacher?” It was not said with a complimentary tone or as a good thing, but condescension.

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There is certainly a privilege in prioritizing values like changing the world over real-world considerations like prioritizing our bank accounts. And in this political climate, there is certainly a lot less incentive and status in trying to change the world over prioritizing your own material well-being. The way a lot of us liberal, college-educated idealists think and shape our lives can seem elite and foreign to a lot of people, and a lot of people don’t like it when we impose those values on others.

I’m not sure what other people would do in my position, but if you put two options next to each other and one option is (1) less stressful and (2) makes more money, most people would take the less stressful and more lucrative job any day of the week. My personal circumstances are lending me towards the latter rather than the former. I’m not going to just give into the mindset that there’s nothing wrong with it, but will just reconcile that I’ve spent a lot of time in a public service profession and it’s just time to move on, from a professional and material perspective.

I guess I could argue that I could make a lot more of a difference with no student loans, no financial worries, a lot of savings, and a more prestigious job. I could, for example, leverage a big law firm’s resources to go above and beyond for a pro bono client and really change their lives with quality legal representation they would not have gotten otherwise. But I will not make that argument.

I do need to make more money and build a hefty legal resume, and I am not going to rationalize it on any other grounds. I have given everything I have into teaching, but I did decide to prioritize pride, ambition, and greed over a longer career in moral service. It’s the less moral choice, but it is what’s best for me and our future, and I will just have to live with it.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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