I quit my job as a teacher after 6 years to work in tech sales. I make $20,000 more, have greater flexibility in my day, and am so much happier now.

• Holly Acre was an elementary school teacher for six years before she left the profession in 2020.
• She now works in tech sales, where she makes $20,000 more, works from home, and has greater work flexibility.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Holly Acre, a former teacher who now works in tech sales. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I got into teaching because I love sharing what I know and I love helping people, so it just seemed natural. Career tests in college all pointed to teaching. My mother was also a teacher, and I think I wanted to be like her, too.

I taught at what is considered a high-poverty school. The way you teach students who live in poverty is different because you need to make sure their basic needs are met before they can learn. I had to really rethink what I thought teaching was.

Some of them had difficult home lives or came from unstructured homes, so a very structured environment at school could be difficult. A lot of the behaviors we saw at our school wore me down over time. It was never any of the students' faults; they might not know how to express their feelings, so they'd behave in ways adults know are inappropriate, but they might not know.

At the end of the day, they needed more support than I could provide. I usually had around 23 students when I taught third grade and 20 when I taught kindergarten. Sometimes I felt a little stretched thin. There were always things being added to our plates, but nothing was ever taken away. We felt overworked.

Before I started teaching, I was a happy-go-lucky person, but over time I noticed teaching was taking that away from me.

My day-to-day was unhealthy. I was experiencing burnout and stress, and my body was telling me in no uncertain terms, "You can't keep doing this." I was in a state of fight or flight.

During the pandemic, our students had the option of learning online or in-person, so we were essentially doing two jobs. When my in-person students went to an enrichment class or P.E., I'd rush back to my classroom to teach online.

You can imagine how difficult it is to teach kindergarten students online. A lot of what they're learning is tactile, like how to hold a pencil. How do you teach that through a computer? How do you get them to sit still at a computer and listen to a lesson?

We didn't have much of a break during the day. Lunch was 30 minutes, but it really came out to 20 because it took five minutes to walk the kids to lunch and five minutes back. And my prep time was spent doing the online lessons.

You don't go into teaching thinking you're going to leave it. It took me a year or two to come to the conclusion that I was leaving and had to learn how to land a corporate job.

In 2020, I started work in an account executive position. It was different, but not that different from teaching. In my interviews, I'd say teachers are constantly selling learning to students. We're always monitoring our students' progress to see if what we're doing is making a difference. You have to get their buy-in, and it can be a hard sell because they're required by law to be there.

So I looked at my new job in the same way, as in: I have a goal to hit, I have tasks that get me closer to that goal, and I monitor my progress along the way.

The difference in my daily life is night and day. When you're surrounded by students day in and day out for years, it can start to wear on you. I was overstimulated having 20 little personalities in the same room as me all day, with only a 20- or 40-minute break. Now, it's just me, and I get to work in a quiet environment.

Before, I commuted 40 minutes each way. Now, I work from home. I can build my own schedule for the most part, unlike in teaching, where there's a pretty rigid schedule. I've since been promoted to sales coach, and I make about $20,000 more now than I did teaching.

A lot of teachers, myself included, think teaching is unsustainable. I would never go back. I achieved that dream, but I'm noticeably happier not in it anymore. Teaching is just what I was exposed to, but I didn't realize how many other ways you can teach in the world. I'm teaching in my current job, just not in a school.

I learned a lot about myself by teaching. I grew so much, and it made me more compassionate.

I don't have all the answers on how to fix teaching, but ideally teachers should have smaller class sizes and more in-school support for teachers' mental health.

To teachers considering quitting, I know it can be difficult to think, "I'm not happy in the job I've been working towards my entire life." But you're not a failure for leaving this job.