Former teachers....what did you do after teaching?

I'm with you. It's not so much the testing for me personally, as a music teacher, but rather the increasing class sizes, the increasing number of students who are getting no discipline at home and parents who think their kid can do no wrong, the full time inclusion of students who would not have been mainstreamed at all five years ago, and just how low everyone's morale is.

Yesterday I taught a first grade class with 29 students in it, three of whom clearly have special needs but whose parents declined testing/services, eight for whom English is a second language, and another half dozen who have never heard the word no at home. Couple that with the fact that their teacher is a spoiled princess who thought elementary ed would be a fun way to spend the years between college and her real goal of getting married, and has basically checked out since she discovered that it's hard work. So the class has no discipline or structure and I'm supposed to fix that in 50 minutes once a week. When it was over I wanted to cry.

We are fortunate not to need my benefits. Ive worked in a corporate environment and would strongly prefer not to go back. I've been networking a lot with friends who work with choral organizations, looking at starting up my voice studio again, and thinking about blending that work with private school teaching and/or offering music classes for homeschool students.

DH wants me to keep working full time until our kids are out of college, but that's probably fourteen years more, and I'm not going to make it in teaching that long. I've been hinting to the head of fine arts in our district that he really needs someone like me to oversee elementary music, but that'll probably never happen. Another possibility is going back to college advising. It's less money for full year work, but basically stress-free and it would keep me in our state's teacher retirement system.