Leaving Academia for K-12 Teaching, Part 7
by Russ Mayo
Welcome back to my series for Ethical ELA called Leaving Academia for K-12 Teaching, where I’ve been writing about my experiences moving from K-12 teaching to working in higher education and back again. For those frustrated or stymied by the career options available in academia today, I’ve also been recommending K-12 teaching as an important but overlooked option.
In previous posts, I wrote about starting my career as a K-12 teacher and the financial problems that many teachers face. Last week, I wrote about my decision-making process when I moved from K-12 teaching to starting a doctoral program in English at The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), putting me on a path to become a college professor. I’ve also discussed the absurd odds of landing a decent job in academia, particularly for those of us in the humanities, which has forced many academics to resort to low-paying work as an adjunct or contingent faculty. This is certainly not the case for everyone. I, for one, managed to beat the odds, landing a tenure-track job in my first search. In this post, I will talk about my experience on the job market, and next time, I’ll share what led me to leave that job and return to K-12 teaching.
My experience with the academic job market began in the fall of 2019. After five years of graduate coursework, teaching, exams, and dissertation research, I began my sixth and final year of doctoral studies at UIC. That fall, in the process of writing my dissertation, I applied to around fifty tenure-track jobs. These jobs were posted in either English or Education from all across the country. I was able to apply to more jobs than most of my peers because I intentionally positioned myself as an interdisciplinary scholar of English (and) Education. Academics are expected to cultivate expertise in a specific field, subject, or specialization, and so by developing a CV that featured work in writing AND pedagogy AND the environment certainly made me a unique candidate. Overall, my interdisciplinary work approach offered the benefit of helping me qualify for more positions.
I was fortunate enough to secure interviews for multiple jobs that fall. One of those interviews was for a position as an Assistant Professor of English and Writing Center Director at Purdue University Northwest (PNW), a regional campus of the Purdue system based in Hammond, Indiana. Soon after my video interview, I was notified that I was a finalist for the position and received an invitation for a two-day campus visit to PNW. My interviews and job talk went well, and I was hopeful in spite of the odds. Two weeks later, in December 2019, I received a call with a job offer, which I happily accepted. In less than three months, my academic job hunt was over. I was incredibly fortunate to be offered a tenure-track job so early in my first national job search.
While I had interest from multiple jobs, I decided to accept this first offer early in the process. Given my peers’ terrible experience hunting for jobs, I felt that I was in no position to turn down any offers. There were also many benefits to taking this position—chief among them was that I could commute from Chicago to nearby Northwest Indiana, allowing me and my family to stay close to our family and friends. I also had the ability to teach both writing and English education classes, and to continue my working writing centers, all from PNW’s Department of English. Since I taught at a regional campus of the Purdue system, I had a higher teaching load (4-4), but teaching was an area of scholarly and personal interest. This is not true for all professors, of course, many of whom prefer research and scholarly work and only teach because it’s a job requirement. For these academics, working at a prestigious, Research-1 institution is the ultimate goal, where the pay is better, the teaching load is much lighter, and their focus is primarily on research.
We were all amazed that I had somehow managed to succeed given the terrible odds of the job market. In March 2020, with a signed job offer in hand, I defended my dissertation, hastily organized as a Zoom meeting because the emerging COVID-19 pandemic had just closed our campus. While my transition from K-12 teacher to doctoral student was smooth, my move from doctoral student to new professor was not. Though, as it turned out, my time working as an English professor would be brief. I ended up working as an Assistant Professor of English for only two years.
There were certainly many things to like about the work: making my own teaching schedule, having my own office and a modest research budget, teaching dozens of wonderful pre-service English teachers and hundreds of first-year writers, directing the writing center, helping bring pediatrician and public health advocate Dr. Mona Hanna to campus as part of our one-book campus reading initiative. I could go on. But not everything was great about the job. Like many of us working remotely during the pandemic, I felt terribly isolated. I also found little reward from spending my day on scholarly or service work, missing the rewarding interactions with students in the classroom.
The university was also clearly in trouble, suffering from the combined impacts of austerity and dropping enrollment, made worse by the ongoing pandemic. In our department, the adjunctification of teaching was used to balance budgets, and as the new writing program director, I had little tolerance for managing such an exploitative system. Our financial strains caused multiple campuses and departments to face rapid, forced consolidations, contributing to competition and mistrust among colleagues and a toxic work culture. Within my first year on the job, both our college dean and the department chair who hired me had left the university. I also struggled to find a place of connection and trust with my colleagues, spending much of my time in that first year teaching virtually from my office in an otherwise shuttered campus.
As I started my second year as an assistant professor in 2021, thankfully now in person, I was already back on the job market. Once again, I ended up as a finalist for multiple positions and received other job offers, but none of them would be a better fit. Each of these other positions required untenable sacrifices—from relocating my family across the country to a place where we knew no one and had no interest in living, to accepting lower pay for essentially the same job. After some difficult deliberations, I ended my second academic job search unsuccessfully. In the process, I realized that it was not only important for me to stay in Chicago, but I wanted to overcome the isolation I felt working in academia in another state and community.
Though I could have continued to work at PNW and wait for a position to open up somewhere in the Chicagoland area, I decided instead to consider a return to K-12 teaching. Compared to the academic job hunt, securing a job offer as a K-12 teacher in Chicago was incredibly simple. After paying a nominal fee to transfer my teaching license from NC to Illinois, I started looking for teaching and administrative positions for which I was qualified with the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Coming out of the pandemic and virtual teaching, Illinois like most states was facing a teacher shortage. Unlike academic job searches, I applied for dozens of jobs for which I was qualified across the district.
I had a few virtual interviews and quickly received an offer to teach at a public high school, though I turned the offer down because I had heard some questionable details about working there from a former student. Not looking to trade one unhappy position for another, I kept applying and interviewing. Soon after, I was interviewing for and was offered a position to teach middle school English Language Arts and Social Studies at a highly regarded, public CPS school. I took the long July 4th weekend to consider the offer. Was I really willing to leave my career academia and return to K-12 teaching after eight years?
The answer, of course, was yes.
Next week, in my final post in this series, I’ll talk about my experiences as a former K-12 teacher, now a scholar, returning to the public school classroom.
For those of you who have transitioned from K-12 teaching to academia, how did you manage the transition? What are the best and worst parts of working in academia for you? What should people on the outside know about the joys and challenges of academic work? Please share your thoughts and questions, and I will do my best to respond here or in future posts.
*Note: The name of this article is a take on the 2001 album Isolation Drills by the indefatigable indie rock icons, Guided By Voices, who have somehow managed to release 41 (!) full-length albums since they formed in 1983.
Russell Mayo is an English Language Arts teacher at Burley School, a public K-8 school on the northside of Chicago. Previously, he worked as an assistant professor of English at Purdue University Northwest, where he served as Writing Center Director and Writing Program Director. Russ completed his doctorate in English Education from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2020. His research centers on writing studies, critical pedagogy, and the environment. Most recently, Russ co-edited and contributed to the Teaching Writing in the Age of Catastrophic Climate Change, (Lexington Press, 2024).