Teaching vs. School Counseling: What I Learned About Which Is Seen As A Better Job From 12 Years In Schools
Last January, I stood in our school’s teacher lounge waiting for my leftover butternut squash soup to heat up, the air thick with the smell of week-old burnt popcorn, when I heard the new 4th grade teacher turn to our new part-time counselor and ask the question I’ve heard a hundred times: “Honestly, between teaching and counseling, which do people say is the better job?”
I’ve done both. I taught 5th grade for eight years, then switched to full-time school counseling four years ago, so I wiped the soup condensation off my water bottle and leaned in to listen to their back and forth. The teacher said all her family outside education keeps telling her how lucky she is to have summers off and a steady classroom routine. The counselor said her family keeps telling her she has it easier—no grading, no lesson plans after hours, right? Neither of them sounded convinced.
When I was teaching, the perception was consistent no matter who I talked to. At holiday dinners, my extended family would nod and say teaching was such a solid, good job. “You get all that time off, you work with kids, it’s so rewarding,” my aunt would say, passing the mashed potatoes. Neighbors would comment that I had the ideal career for work-life balance. Even other people outside education assumed teaching was unquestionably better than counseling. When I mentioned I was thinking of switching, more than one person asked why I’d give up a “real teaching job” for something that felt less permanent.
That perception came with a lot of unspoken assumptions no one talked about. No one asked about the 45 minutes I spent every night responding to parent emails after my own kid went to bed. No one asked about the weekend I spent re-writing my math unit plan because the district changed the curriculum three weeks into the school year. I remember one Tuesday in my third year of teaching: a 10-year-old student named Milo came in, sat down at his desk, and 20 minutes into reading he flipped his desk over screaming that he didn’t care about anything. I got the class settled, walked him down to the counseling office, and found out our only full-time counselor was already tied up with a middle school student who’d threatened to hurt themselves. I ended up skipping my lunch and my prep period to sit with Milo in the empty conference room, splitting my last granola bar with him while he told me his mom had lost her job and they were sleeping on a cousin’s couch. I didn’t have the training or the time to unpack all of that with him, but I couldn’t send him back to class, either. I left school that day at 6:30, still had 12 spelling tests to grade, and I remember thinking I wished I could just focus on the part of helping kids that actually mattered to me.
When I switched to counseling, the perception flipped. Other teachers would tell me I had the better job now. “No more lesson plans, no more 25 kids all needing something from you at once, that’s way better,” they’d say. But other teachers would also say they could never do my job—hearing all the hard stuff every day, carrying that home with you. Parents still mostly assume counseling is the easier, softer side of school, until they need it. Last year, a mom came in crying after her 7th grader started having panic attacks before school, and she told me she’d never thought of school counseling as a real job until that moment. She’d just assumed it was for kids who got sent to the office for fighting.
The pattern I’ve seen over and over is this: outside of school walls, teaching is almost always seen as the better job. It fits a familiar, comfortable narrative. Everyone knows what a teacher does. It’s stable, it’s visible, it has clear perks people can point to. Counseling is often seen as a secondary, less important role, something that’s nice to have if you can afford it, but not core to what school does. Inside the building, it’s more mixed. Newer teachers, burnt out on testing mandates and constant paperwork, often see counseling as the better, more fulfilling job. Veteran teachers, who love the routine of the classroom and the big group wins when a whole class finally gets fractions, almost always say they’d never switch, and see counseling as too unstructured and emotionally draining to be “better.”
For parents, this matters more than you might think. Most public school counselors have caseloads of 250 to 350 kids, way above the recommended limit. If you need to meet with your child’s counselor, give three days advance notice when you can. Don’t expect them to squeeze you in the same day unless it’s an emergency. Their days are full of last-minute crises no one plans for, and that 15 minute check-in you need for your kid has to fit around five other urgent needs that popped up that morning. If you’re a teacher thinking about switching to counseling, don’t just go by what people say about it being easier. Spend a day shadowing your school’s counselor to see what their actual day looks like—most of them will be happy to let you. You might find that the emotional weight of carrying so many kids’ hard stories is heavier than the lesson planning you thought you hated.
Last week, Milo, that kid who flipped his desk seven years ago, stopped by my office. He’s a sophomore now, and he comes in once a month to check in about college applications and his mom’s new apartment. He said he still remembers me sitting with him that day in the conference room, sharing my granola bar. I thought about that question, which job is better. Most people will still tell you teaching is the better job, because that’s what they know. It’s more visible, more stable, fits the story we all have of what a good school job looks like. I still love subbing for a day when the school is short, getting to stand in front of a class and do a read-aloud. But I also love what I do now, getting to sit with kids like Milo for more than one lunch period a year. There’s no neat answer to which is better, just different roles that fit different people. For now, that’s enough.
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