How to Quit Teaching
Book cover: How to Quit Teaching, in heavy navy and orange lettering above an illustration of a person with a backpack standing where a path forks — one branch toward a school, one toward a sunrise.

How to Quit Teaching

An honest, practical guide to leaving education — or staying on your own terms.

Gregory Morgan, M.Ed. · Independently published, 2026

Twelve chapters, a twelve-month exit plan, a ninety-day sprint for people who are already out of patience, and a fourteen-tool workbook you can actually write in.

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Who it's for

Experienced teachers who have started wondering whether they want to be in a classroom for the rest of their working life — and who would like to answer that question with arithmetic instead of a bad week.

It assumes you are competent, tired, and financially nervous. It does not assume you want to be talked out of anything.

Who it isn't for

If you want permission to walk out tomorrow, this is the wrong book. If you want someone to tell you teaching is a noble calling and you should stay forever, it's also the wrong book.

Staying deliberately is completely different from staying because you believe you have no options.

Chapter 12, The First Year After

The chapters

  1. 1Do You Actually Want to Quit? Whether you want a different life or a better version of this one. Sunk cost, identity, the risks of staying, and how to have the conversation with the person whose life is attached to your paycheck.
  2. 2Know Your Number Survival number, runway number, walk-away number. Recurring payments as claims on your future income. Why you compare life to life, not salary to salary.
  3. 3What Happens to Your Pension? What you have actually earned, what vesting means for you, and how to price what three or five more years would buy — instead of repeating "I can't leave because of the pension."
  4. 4What Happens to Your Health Insurance? Your paycheck deduction is the discount, not the price. Four doors after district coverage ends, the waiting-period gap, and the questions to get answered in writing.
  5. 5Build the Skills Before You Need Them "Teachers can do anything" is useless. What kinds of work use what you're already good at, what's genuinely missing, and how to build evidence while someone is still paying you.
  6. 6Use AI Without Becoming Full of Shit AI may improve the presentation of your experience. It does not get to invent the experience. Includes the prompts worth using and the truth test worth applying.
  7. 7Your Resume Is Not a Teaching Resume Anymore Translating what you did into what a hiring manager recognizes, with real before-and-after bullets. The facts do not change. The spotlight does.
  8. 8Build the Network Before You Need It Talking to people who know things you don't know yet, without sending anyone a message that begins "Dear esteemed professional." What to ask, and what to never lead with.
  9. 9The Job Search Will Mess With Your Head Why rejection at the top of the funnel is normal, how to read your own results, and how to avoid accepting something bad because you got tired.
  10. 10Interviewing Outside Education Rust is not incompetence. Building a story bank, answering the question actually asked, and what to do when you don't know: don't bluff, show them how you think.
  11. 11The Exit and the Offer The full story of the last year — the sick-day bank, the reassignment, resigning without another job, the offers, the panel interview that went badly, and negotiating for the first time.
  12. 12The First Year After Being the new guy at forty. What was better, what was genuinely worse, what I missed, and why the first job after teaching is a bridge rather than a destination.

And in the back

  • 12-month planTwelve months out to one month out, one job per month, ending with a decision rather than a resignation.
  • 90-day sprintFor the version of you who says "twelve months? School starts again in ninety days."
  • 14 toolsStay-or-go diagnostic, the three numbers, pension decision sheet, health coverage worksheet, career target sheet, skill-gap matrix, AI truth test, resume translation, networking sheet, job-search funnel, interview prep, offer comparison, resignation checklist, first ninety days.
Illustration of a pension drawn as an iceberg: a small visible balance above the waterline and a much larger mass of service credit, vesting rules, and future income below it.
From Chapter 3. Most people can see the account balance. The decision lives under the waterline.

Formats

Available as a Kindle ebook. A paperback edition — with the full workbook and room to write in it — is on the way. The ebook points to printable versions of the worksheets here on the site.

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