Teaching vs. School Counseling: Which Is Actually A Better Job, From Someone Who Did Both
The lukewarm coffee in my mug was starting to grow a skin when the new 2nd grade teacher leaned across the staff lounge table and asked the question. “I’ve been looking at counseling certification programs, and everyone’s got a different take. Which do you think is actually better, teaching or school counseling?” The room went quiet for a beat, the copy machine hummed down the hall, and a half-eaten blueberry muffin sat sweating on the counter by the door. Everyone waited for my answer, since I’ve done both: six years in 4th grade classroom, three years as the K-5 counselor at our school.
Back when I was still teaching, most people saw it as the clearly better job. Parents would say it over and over at parent-teacher conferences: “What a blessing to get to shape kids every day, you have the best job.” Extended family brought it up at holidays: “At least you get all that time off in the summer, can’t beat that.” Even other staff members viewed classroom teaching as more “real” work, with clear, tangible rewards that counseling didn’t offer. I felt that too, for the most part. I loved the first day of school, when all the kids showed up with new backpacks and sharp pencils. I loved the day every year when the slowest reader in class finished their first whole chapter book and ran over to show me.
But what no one talked about out loud back then was how heavy the unwritten parts of teaching were. I’d leave school every day with a tote bag full of grading that I’d pull out after dinner, and half the time I’d end up responding to parent emails at 9:30 at night. I had 28 kids in my class, and every year at least three of them were dealing with stuff that had nothing to do with long division or reading comprehension—food insecurity, separated parents, a sick sibling. I wanted to help, but I had a curriculum to get through, a testing window to hit, and I couldn’t just drop everything to sit with a kid for 20 minutes when they melted down over a broken crayon.
The turning point was a boy named Javi, third grade, who acted out every single day, throwing erasers, refusing to do work. I referred him to counseling, and two sessions in he told my old coworker that his dad had lost his job and was sleeping in their car after they got evicted. I’d spent six weeks trying to get him to talk, and I never got that out of him. I realized I didn’t have the time or the specific training to do that part of the work well. That’s when I started looking at counseling programs.
When I switched, I noticed the perception flipped suddenly. Now teachers would say to me all the time, “I could never do your job. I couldn’t carry all that heavy stuff every day.” A lot of people outside of school still see it as the easier job, though—they think counselors just do conflict mediation and fun group activities about feelings. What they don’t see is that the national recommended caseload is 250 kids per counselor, and mine’s 312. I get called for a crisis at least twice a week, I spend more time filling out mandated reporting paperwork than I ever spent grading, and I rarely get to leave work at 3:30 the way most classroom teachers do. I can’t leave the heavy stuff at work sometimes, either— I’ll go home and still be thinking about the kid who told me no one at home feeds him on the weekends.
When Mia asked me which was better, I told her it’s not a question of good or bad, it’s a question of what you can carry. The practical stuff I tell anyone considering the switch is to shadow your school counselor for a full day before you apply to any programs. You’ll see what the job actually looks like: getting pulled out of lunch three times, moving a pre-scheduled check-in to make room for a kid who just had a panic attack before math, navigating messy family dynamics that you can’t fix. And for parents reading this, understanding these differences helps you get the right support for your kid too. A classroom teacher can’t drop 20 other kids to do a 20-minute check-in when your kid is upset after a fight with a friend. If you need that kind of ongoing support, reach out directly to the school counselor, and if you don’t hear back in three days, send a gentle follow-up email—we’re not ignoring you, we’re just juggling 10 different things at once.
Last week I got a card in the mail from Lila, a girl I had in my 4th grade class seven years ago. She wrote that I was the first teacher who told her she was good at writing, and she just got accepted to her dream journalism program. I kept the card on my desk next to the drawing that a 5th grade girl I’ve been checking in with gave me last week—she drew my golden retriever, with a rainbow around his head, and wrote “thank you for listening” at the bottom.
I still get asked which is the better job every few weeks, in the staff lounge, at parent nights, at family barbecues. I don’t have a neat answer. Some Fridays I look at the stack of case notes on my desk and think about how nice it would be to just grade a stack of book reports and call it a week. Some days I walk past my old classroom, see the kids sitting on the rug for morning meeting, and I miss the predictable, daily joy of watching kids learn something new. Right now, counseling fits me better. That’s the only answer I’ve got.
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