Teaching vs. School Counseling: What I Learned Working Both Roles
Last month in the elementary school staff lounge, I was pouring a lukewarm cup of coffee when I overheard two new college grads – one a first-year 1st grade teacher, one a part-time counseling intern – hashing out which job is better overall. The teacher leaned against the vending machine and said, “Counseling has it made. No lesson plans, no grading papers at 10pm, no nagging kids about turning in homework every single day.” The intern just laughed into her soda and said, “Are you kidding? At least you get to go home at the end of the day and leave work at work. I go home thinking about the kid who told me his dad got arrested last weekend and I can’t do anything about it.” I just stirred my coffee and didn’t chime in, because I’ve done both. I taught 4th grade for seven years outside Portland, Oregon, and I’ve been an elementary school counselor here for the last three. I get why people ask which is better; I wondered the same thing for years.
When I was teaching, I thought counseling was hands down the better job. I remember one rainy April afternoon, I’d just broken up a fight over a limited-edition fidget spinner, graded 27 fraction quizzes during my 20-minute lunch, and gotten three angry emails from parents that same day – one upset her kid wasn’t getting enough homework, one upset her kid got too much. I trekked down to the counseling office to vent, and my old counselor was just sitting at her desk coloring with a 3rd grader who’d had a panic attack before state testing. It looked so calm. No data entry for district progress reports, no filling out report cards every nine weeks, no wrangling 28 different energy levels into one room every single morning. I left that meeting knowing I’d switch as soon as I could save up enough for my certification. When I put in my resignation, most of my teacher friends said, “Good for you, you’re escaping the chaos.” That was the consensus back then: counseling was the softer, easier, better job.
The first six months as a counselor, I got a rude awakening. I still work 10-hour days most weeks, I just don’t grade papers anymore. Instead, I keep a beat-up binder full of kid stories that don’t have happy endings. There’s the 2nd grader who hides under my desk every Wednesday, because the shelter her family’s staying at has too much loud fighting overnight. I got her family on the housing voucher waiting list, but the list is two years long. I can give her extra peanut butter granola bars and let her draw all over my whiteboard, but I can’t give her a stable bed to sleep in every night. Last semester, I did three suicide risk assessments for middle schoolers in one week, and by the end of it I sat in my car in the parking lot for 20 minutes before I could drive home, my chest too tight to breathe. When I meet parents at back-to-school night now, they almost always say, “I could never do that job, it’s just so sad all the time. Teaching must have been way easier.” Now the consensus is flipped: teaching is the better, lighter job.
What I’ve learned after doing both is that “better” just depends on what you can carry – and what you can’t see from the outside. All the parts of each job that look easier from across the staff lounge are just the parts you don’t witness as an outsider. Teachers see the counselor leave 10 minutes early one day, but don’t see they stayed two hours late the day before walking a kid through a panic attack after their parents split. Counselors see the teacher walk out the door right when the final bell rings, but don’t see they’re going to sit at their kitchen table grading until 9pm that night, after their own kids go to bed.
This isn’t just an inside-baseball conversation for education staff, either. It matters for parents, who are just trying to get help for their kid and understand why things take time. There are small, concrete things anyone can do to make both roles work better for everyone. If you’re a parent emailing a teacher or a counselor after work hours, just add one line: “No rush to get back to me until your next work day.” That takes so much unspoken pressure off. Both roles get dozens of emails a day, and the expectation to reply immediately after hours is an extra unpaid load no one talks about. If you’re a teacher who’s never actually asked your school counselor what their caseload looks like, ask them to grab a quick lunch one semester. Most teachers assume counselors just sit around waiting for kids to have meltdowns, but most elementary counselors have 200+ kids on their caseload – that’s 200 different families, 200 different problems to keep track of every week. If you’re a counselor, check in with the classroom teachers on your hall: ask them how much time they spend on grading and lesson plans outside of contract hours, and bring them a donut one morning when you know they’re wrapping up report cards.
I still don’t have a clear answer for which is the better job overall. Some weeks, when I get to spend an hour playing checkers with a kid who just needs someone to pay attention to them, and I don’t have to write a lesson plan for the next morning, I think counseling is better. Some weeks, when I’ve had three really heavy meetings back to back, I think back to teaching 4th grade, how at the end of the week you get to see a kid finally nail their multiplication facts, and you have that concrete win right in front of you, and I think teaching was better.
The thing no one tells you before you pick either role is that there’s no perfect, less stressful job in K-12 education. Both matter, both are hard in completely different ways, and the grass always looks greener when you’re only seeing the surface of the other person’s job. Right now, what works for me is that I get to see both sides. I bring extra chocolate chip cookies to the 4th grade teachers when they’re grading report cards, and they bring me iced coffee after I’ve had a really hard week. It’s not perfect, and some days are still overwhelming. But it works, for now.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Teaching vs