Why I Quit Teaching in Thailand

I recently made the decision to give up teaching in Thailand; at least for a while. The fact is that I had stopped being happy at work. The reason for my recent dissatisfaction with teaching was mostly due to me, but as I lost interest the problems with my school, and just teaching in Thailand generally, became glaringly obvious. I began to dread going to work, and this is not the way that I want to live.

I really believe that we have a path in life, and if we don't follow this path then life becomes increasingly painful; I previously spent almost two decades on the wrong path and learnt just how bad things can become. I don't mean to sound overly spiritual here; my point is that a part of our mind knows what we want/need and if we ignore this that part of the mind won't be happy. This is what I was finding with teaching; I realized that it wasn't really for me almost a year ago, but I tried to continue regardless waiting for the correct time to exit. The more I delayed though, the more the job felt a bit unbearable.

For the last few years I have increasingly come to realize that I want to make my living as a writer. I have always wanted to do this, but it is only recently that it has become feasible. Writing is unlikely to make me rich, but I know that it is possible for me to earn at least as much money as I have been getting from teaching in Thailand. I have been involved in freelance writing for a couple of years, and have a good idea about how it all works. It is hard, but the truth is that I would rather write for twelve hours a day, seven days a week, than teach for twenty hours a week.

I had planned to wait until the next term before turning full-time at freelance writing, but I realized that teaching was just getting harder for me as time went on. I didn't want to turn into a teacher who was just going through the motions because I felt the students deserved a whole lot better than this. I was also becoming increasingly hard to work with as everything that was going on in the school was becoming a cause of resentment. In the end the idea of returning to that for six more months seemed unbearable so I took the chance, and quit waiting for my life to begin.

I have a wife and son so this type of decision couldn't be taken lightly, but once I did make my choice there was a huge sense of relief, and the feeling that I'm going in the right direction again. Life is too short for being timid and not taking chances; sometime we just have to go with our dreams and have confidence that we will end up where we should.

I devoted about seven years of my life to teaching in Thailand; I even completed a Post Graduate Certificate in Education and other courses. I don't regret any of this, and don't feel that the time was wasted. I just know that it needed to come to an end; at least for a while. Maybe in a few years my enjoyment for teaching will return; and I might go back to it. I feel sure that if I continued teaching, even for another few months, it would have led to stage where teaching would have become so unbearable that I would never want to return to it.