What 33 Years in the Same Classroom Taught Me About Staying

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A conversation with Dan Tricarico, The Zen Teacher

There's a teacher in San Diego who has been in the same classroom for 33 years.

Same school. Same room. Same four walls. He jokes with his students that instead of going to West Hills High School for four years, he got to go for 33.

His name is Dan Tricarico. He's the author of The Zen Teacher, a book about focus, simplicity, and tranquility in the classroom. He's been writing about teacher self-care since 2013—which, depending on when you discovered the conversation around educator wellness, might be before you even knew the conversation existed.

Here's what I didn't expect when I sat down to talk with him: Dan almost didn't make it.

Around year 20, with a decade still left on the clock, he started burning out. Not the "I'm tired on Fridays" kind of burnout. The deeper kind—where you start looking at the years ahead and quietly wondering if you can actually do this.

Instead of quitting, he started writing. And that writing changed everything.

Teaching Can Be a Calling. It Doesn't Have to Be Your Identity.

We talk a lot about teaching as a calling. And it is, for a lot of us. You don't stay in a classroom for 26 years (my count) or 33 years (Dan's) because the compensation is irresistible. There has to be something else driving it—a sense of purpose, a genuine belief that what you're doing matters.

But there's a version of "teaching is my calling" that quietly becomes "teaching is all I am." And that's where it gets dangerous.

When your whole identity is wrapped up in the job, every bad day is an identity crisis. Every difficult student is a referendum on who you are. Every policy change that makes your work harder feels like a personal attack—because in a way, it is. It's attacking the thing you've built your entire sense of self around.

Dan's been thinking about this for years. "We all have various facets of our life and our personality," he told me. "Teaching is just one of them."

That's worth sitting with. You're a teacher. But you're also a parent, a reader, a friend, a photographer, a person who likes hot chocolate on Saturday mornings. The classroom is one room in the house. It's not the whole house.

The 40 Stories You Don't Know

Dan said something else that stuck with me—something he learned about a decade into his career, when he finally started paying attention.

If you have 40 students in your classroom, you have 40 stories you know nothing about.

One student didn't eat breakfast. One had a fight with her mom last night. One just got a text from a friend that devastated him. One is carrying something you'll never know about unless he decides to tell you.

You walk in ready to teach the lesson. They walk in carrying everything that happened before they got to your door.

"You have to create the empathy and compassion and caring that you need to be an effective teacher," Dan said. "You have to remember that there are stories in all of those desks that you are completely unaware of."

I'll be honest—it took me a long time to really get this. For years, my story felt like the important one. My agenda. My lesson. My objectives. The shift to genuinely wondering about theirs—that changed my classroom more than any professional development I've ever sat through.

The Five S's (And Why Our Culture Fights All of Them)

If you've been following Dan's work for any length of time, you've probably encountered the Five S's. Every single one of them is something our culture—and specifically, our profession—actively discourages.

Stillness. We reward busyness. The teacher who's always doing something, always in motion, always available.

Silence. We fill every gap. The quiet moment in the teacher's lounge gets broken by someone sharing a story, checking their phone, or turning on a podcast.

Space. Our calendars are owned by other people's priorities from the moment we walk in the door.

Subtraction. We add. We always add. Another initiative, another requirement, another program.

Slowing down. Try telling your administration you're working on slowing down. See how that lands.

And yet—every teacher I've ever talked to who has stayed in the profession for 20, 30, 33 years has found their own version of these five things. Maybe they didn't call it that. But they found a way to create stillness somewhere. They found a way to protect some silence. They subtracted something.

The teachers who burned out and left? A lot of them never did.

Subtraction: The Practice Nobody Talks About

I asked Dan to go deeper on subtraction, because I think it's the one most people skip over.

He wrote a blog post years ago called "Just One Thing." The premise is simple: when you're overwhelmed, look at your calendar and remove one thing. Not ten. Not a whole overhaul. One.

"When you have that blank space on the calendar," he said, "guess who filled all those squares up? We did. It's a choice."

That blank space you just created? You can fill it with something you actually love. Or—and Dan says this is the real magic—you can fill it with nothing. Just let life unfold for a minute.

I know. That sounds impossible. But try it once. Remove one thing this week. Something you agreed to out of obligation, or guilt, or a vague sense that you should. Take it off the list. See what happens.

That's the practice.

Slowing Down Is a Skill (And Margins Are How You Build It)

Here's how Dan thinks about slowing down: margins.

Not the margins on a page. The margins on either side of tasks—buffer time you build into your day so you're not sprinting from one thing directly to the next.

He's the guy who shows up early. Not just on-time early. Ridiculously early. And when he gets there, he doesn't scroll his phone. He sits. He breathes. He looks out the window. He gives himself a few minutes that belong to nobody's agenda but his own.

His daughter grew up watching this and knew it so well that when her friends would say "your dad won't be here for a while," she'd say, "No—he's probably already parked down the street."

That image stuck with me. Because most of us are racing to arrive on time, which means we arrive already behind. Already scattered. Already in reactive mode.

What if you arrived early enough to just... be there for a minute first?

On Gratitude (Without the Toxic Positivity)

We talked about this for a while—the difference between genuine gratitude and the performative positivity that teachers get force-fed at the beginning of every school year.

Dan's clear on the distinction. Zen and mindfulness aren't about pretending everything is fine. They're about acknowledging what actually is. "It's okay to say I'm sad. It's okay to say I'm overwhelmed. That's just what is."

Toxic positivity is the Pollyanna version—everything's great, everything's fine, keep smiling. It's not just unhelpful. It's dysfunctional. It's a way of refusing to look at reality.

Gratitude is different. Gratitude is noticing what's real and true alongside whatever is hard. "There's always a bird singing," Dan said. "There's always a song you like. There's always something."

That's not denial. That's a practice. And it's one of the few things Dan said he genuinely returns to when the job feels impossible.

The Book That Changed the Way Dan Thinks About Hard Days

He recommended The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer—and the reason he gave is worth passing along directly.

Early in the book, Palmer writes about how some days in teaching are extraordinary. Everything clicks, the students are with you, the lesson sings. And some days are complete disasters.

Dan said when he read that, he felt a physical sense of relief. Because for years, he'd thought the bad days were his dirty little secret. Evidence that he wasn't good enough, consistent enough, together enough to be doing this job.

Finding out that one of the great educators and writers on teaching felt the same way changed something for him.

The bad days aren't a sign you're doing it wrong. They're a sign you're teaching human beings in the real world. The surfing metaphor Dan used: you surf whatever comes up. Some waves cooperate. Some don't.

If you're newer to teaching and you've had a run of bad days lately—this is your permission slip. It doesn't mean you're not cut out for this. It means you're in it.

The Parting Words That I Keep Coming Back To

Dan ended our conversation with the same sign-off he used to close every episode of his podcast. I'm not going to dress it up or frame it. Just leaving it here:

"You're okay exactly how you are. And you have more power than you think."

You don't need another platform. Another login. Another framework. Another set of strategies. What you're doing is enough. Who you are is enough.

But—you do have more influence in that room than you sometimes believe. More ability to shape the experience your students have, to set the tone, to decide what kind of classroom culture you're creating.

Both things are true at once. You're okay as you are, and you have real power. That combination is worth sitting with.

Listen to the Full Conversation

Dan and I went deep on a lot more in this episode—his Zen Teacher origin story, why he started doing portrait photography of his colleagues, poetry as a mindfulness practice, and his pick for the Teacher Commuter Playlist (it's a good one).

🎧 Listen to the episode here

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