Teaching vs. School Counseling: What I Learned Working Both Jobs About Which Is Better Overall
The microwave beeped over the hum of the vending machine in the Westbrook High staff lounge last month, and I was reaching for my leftover lentil soup when Lila, the first-year 10th grade English teacher, leaned against the table across from me and asked the question I get at least once a semester. “I’m thinking about getting my master’s in counseling, everyone says it’s such a better job than classroom teaching. You did both, right? Is it true?”
I spent seven years teaching 8th grade ELA before switching to school counseling four years ago in the same district, so I’ve had a front row seat to how both roles are perceived. Almost everyone I talk to, from new teachers to my cousin who sells insurance outside of education, assumes school counseling is the better, easier gig. When I told my department head I was leaving the classroom, she sighed and said “good for you, getting out before the burnout eats you alive.” Most teachers I know list the same perks: no 150 essays to grade over the weekend, no daily lesson plans aligned to 17 different state standards, no 30+ 13-year-olds crammed into a room that’s 10 degrees too warm for five periods straight. It sounds like a vacation by comparison.
I get it. I remember my last year teaching, I stayed until 7:30 one Wednesday grading persuasive essays, got home, heated up a frozen burrito, and got an email from a parent at 9:14pm saying I’d “misunderstood” their son’s argument about school dress codes and that I needed to raise his grade by the end of the weekend. I sat on my couch staring at the screen, and that’s when I knew I wanted a change. I loved connecting with kids, but I never had time to do the kind of connecting I’d gone into education to do.
My first month as a counselor, I had a 7th grader who showed up at my office door at 8:15am crying so hard she could barely talk. Her parents had told her they were getting divorced the night before, and she’d walked to school instead of getting in the car with her dad because she didn’t want to talk to him. I spent two hours that morning just sitting with her, rescheduled three meetings I was supposed to be in, called her grandma to come pick her up, and checked in with her three times that week. That same month, I responded to a suicide threat in the middle of my lunch break, coordinated a safety plan for a kid who was being bullied online, and called CPS after a student mentioned his mom’s boyfriend had been hitting him. By the end of that first month, I was more exhausted than I’d ever been in the classroom.
Back in the staff lounge, Lila nodded, scribbling a quick note on a crumpled napkin. I told her that most of the time, people only see the parts of counseling that look easy. They see me walking down the hall with a coffee, not the 10 crisis check-ins I did before first period. They don’t see me sitting in a parking lot outside a teen’s group home after school, talking them down from a panic attack because they don’t have anyone else to call. They don’t see me carrying a kid’s story with me all weekend, replaying what I said, wondering if I missed a warning sign.
That said, even with all that weight, most people inside education still see counseling as a better job overall, and for a lot of people, it is. The biggest difference I’ve noticed is that in teaching, most of your work is finite. You grade the papers, you write the lesson plan, you enter the grades and you can walk away. In counseling, the work is almost always open-ended. But you also get the thing most teachers don’t have time for: you get to show up for the stuff that doesn’t fit on a state test. When I was teaching, I had a kid who always fell asleep in first period, and all I could do was send him to the office and mark him tardy. As a counselor, I found out he was sleeping on the couch because his family was homeless, connected them to a local shelter, got him free breakfast and lunch every day, and met with him once a week to talk through how he was doing. That’s the work I wanted when I first started in education.
If you’re an educator thinking about switching, the two concrete pieces of advice I give are: first, shadow a counselor for a full day before you commit. Don’t just talk to them over lunch in the staff lounge. Sit in on their crisis meetings, sort through their inbox with them, see how many urgent requests come in before 10am. Second, be honest with yourself about how you handle open-ended stress. If you need to leave work at work 90% of the time, teaching might still be a better fit for you. I think about my active cases at least two weekends a month, something I almost never did when I was grading papers—once the grade was entered, it was done.
For parents, the biggest thing I want you to know is that both jobs are hard, just in different ways. Your kid’s teacher doesn’t have time to sit with them for 45 minutes when they’re upset about a fight with a friend, and your school counselor doesn’t get to see the small daily wins of watching a kid learn to love reading. If you have a minute this semester, drop a cookie or a coffee off for both of them—they both need it.
After we finished talking, Lila folded up her napkin and tucked it in her bag, then headed off to her next class. Ms. Lopez, who’s been teaching math here for 21 years, looked up from her quiz grading and said “I could never do your job. I don’t know how you carry all that.” I laughed and said I could never go back to grading 150 algebra tests a week, so we’re even. Some weeks, I miss the roar of a classroom discussion, the quick burst of joy when a kid raises their hand and finally gets a topic they’ve been struggling with. Other weeks, I leave work and I know I did the kind of work I always wanted to do, the work that doesn’t show up on a report card. There’s no one right answer for which is better. It just depends on what weight you want to carry.
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