I left a tech career for a fifth-grade classroom — and it isn't expected or the end

There's an announcement I grew up hearing every day in my childhood Hong Kong. It came from the ceiling of the MTR — first in Cantonese, then English, then Mandarin, calm and clear: "The next station is…"

I never once thought about who recorded it, or whether she knew where she was going. She just told us the truth: you are here, and the next stop is coming.

Last year, I needed that voice more than I knew.

1. The door closed

In 2025, I left my last product-manager job — not by choice, and not on my own timeline. And for a few weeks I did the arithmetic every laid-off parent does: one income, two kids, a mortgage clock I could feel ticking in SF. The obvious answer was a gap year. Care for the children properly, see this as a pause on the career, and go back to tech interviews when the timing improved.

But the question that wouldn't leave me alone was this: is that actually the only path — or just the one everybody wants you to take?

2. The half marathon

Right then — in the same season — I ran the San Francisco Half Marathon. My first in ten years.

I hadn't earned myself a comfortable start. I'd lost my running legs, and the first miles were mostly the sound of my own doubts keeping pace with me. But somewhere along the route I began to notice the crowd: hundreds of us, all moving at our own paces, toward our own goals. Nobody at mile 6 was racing the person at mile 4. The uphills were rough. The last two or three miles were harder than everything before them — and somehow, along the way, I stopped comparing my splits to anyone else's.

I finished it. With a personal record, of all things.

It taught me something I didn't know I'd need: the pacing is up to me. Not the layoff. Not the economy. Not the timeline the tech industry expects a résumé to follow. Mine.

3. Slowing down to look around

So instead of a gap year, I took the smallest possible step: substitute teaching. Partly for income. Partly to see — from the inside — what my own kids' school days were made of.

And substitute teaching turned out to be the most eye-opening research project of my life. Different grade levels. Regular classrooms, art rooms, PE fields. Special-education classrooms that showed me how much skill real support takes. An ecosystem of staff who know children in ways no dashboard ever revealed to me. And then the kids themselves, some of whom changed my thinking in ways I still haven't fully written down — which is honestly where this blog comes from in the first place.

What I expected to be a temporary stop kept becoming a route I wanted to stay on.

And then there was the boy — the one everyone warned me about. "The challenging kid," with that particular tone teachers use when they mean buckle up. One afternoon, I didn't manage him the way the notes probably expected. I gave him math problems at exactly his edge — hard enough to matter, close enough to reach — and he solved one, then came back for another. Then another. He kept coming back, on purpose, choosing math over everything else he could have been doing in that room.

I still think about him more than I'd predicted. Nobody turned him around in an afternoon, and I'm not claiming that kind of magic. But something in that moment reorganized my assumptions — about what's reachable, about what "challenging" actually measures, and about the kinds of adults a kid decides to walk toward. Substitute teaching was supposed to be my detour. That boy made it look more like a route.

4. The paperwork mountain

Getting here took more than a change of heart — it took a mountain of tedious process: credential program hours on Mon/Thu evenings, exams, application portals, fingerprints, transcripts, deadlines that overlapped with spelling tests and homework trackers. A full working semester stacked on top of a full-time life. I have a fresh stack of deadlines even this week — which is normal, apparently, for anyone making an unglamorous pivot when kids are watching.

The truth nobody puts on the brochure: the giving up is real, and so is the paperwork. The dream part is not free. But every deadline I've survived has removed another layer of the question "was this a mistake?" and replaced it with something quieter — this is worth it.

5. It isn't the end

Here's what I want to tell the person I was at 1am, and every mom (or dad — or anyone, really) reading this at 1am in their own kitchen:

Leaving a career isn't the end. It's the space between announcements.

The train doesn't vanish at a closed door. The next station still comes. And once you're moving again, you get to decide the pacing — uphill or not. What I gave up was real. What I found is real too: work that feeds me instead of merely filling my calendar, and a life where my kids get to watch what a pivot looks like up close, rather than hear about one decades later.

I don't know every station after this one — teaching, writing, building tools for other families, one of the many station names I haven't heard yet. But for the first time in a while, I'm not afraid of the announcement.

下一站係 第五班的教室 ｜ The next station is: a fifth-grade classroom.

There are more stations coming. If you'd like to ride along, subscribe — the next one arrives in a few days: what teaching immersion and being a bilingual parent are teaching me about what American schools get wrong about bilingualism

— announced on Mom's Transition Route · 下一站是……