What Teachers Can Learn from Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Ms. Alvarez graded papers late into the evening because grading during the day, at home, had become unpredictable. Her partner would praise how dedicated she was to her students one night, then the next accuse her of caring more about other people's kids than her own life. He'd apologize by morning with flowers and breakfast, and for a day or two things felt easy again. She started grading in her car in the school parking lot, telling herself it was about focus. A colleague noticed she seemed distracted during a staff meeting and asked if she was okay. She almost said yes automatically, the way she always did, before realizing she wasn't sure anymore what "okay" even meant for her.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Recognizing the pattern instead of extending more patience
Teachers are skilled at seeing behavior in context and adjusting their response with compassion, which is valuable in a classroom but can work against clarity at home. The book's core insight, that a cycle of idealization and devaluation is a pattern rather than a string of isolated hard days, asks a teacher to apply the same pattern-recognition skill they'd use with a struggling student to their own life.
Not every rough patch in a relationship is part of a larger cycle, and treating every disagreement as evidence can create its own kind of unfairness.
Keep a brief, private note of dates when warmth suddenly followed criticism, reviewed monthly.
The self-doubt is a symptom, not a grading error
Teachers are used to reflecting on their own performance constantly, which can make relationship-driven self-doubt feel like one more thing they're failing at, rather than what it actually is: an expected effect of sustained inconsistency from someone close to them. Naming it that way protects a teacher's confidence in the classroom, where steadiness genuinely matters for students.
Real classroom stress also causes self-doubt, so not every low moment traces back to the relationship.
Before assuming a bad day is your fault, ask whether the doubt started at home.
Weighing the real factors, the way you'd plan a unit
Teachers already know how to plan around real constraints, time, resources, and student needs, rather than wishful thinking. That same structured approach, applied to safety, finances, and personal values, can bring useful clarity to a relationship decision without rushing it.
A relationship cannot be lesson-planned into a tidy sequence, and some parts of the decision will resist structure entirely.
Write the real factors on one list and the hopes on another, and look at them separately.
Building your own support, not just your students'
Teachers spend their days building safety and consistency for children who need it and often forget to ask the same for themselves. Whatever a teacher ultimately decides, having steady outside support, a therapist, a trusted friend, or both, matters far more than reaching the decision quickly or alone.
The habit of extending patience and giving people the benefit of the doubt, essential in teaching, can pull against the clear-eyed recognition this book asks for; a teacher can hold both by keeping compassion for the person separate from clarity about the pattern, extending kindness without letting it blur what is actually repeating.
Name one thing, honestly
- Where have I used my classroom patience to excuse something at home I wouldn't excuse in a colleague's marriage? - What would I tell a favorite student who described this same cycle to me? - Who outside my classroom knows what I'm actually going through?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Write the real factors on one list and the hopes on another, and look at them separately.