48 hours to decide: Fire or fight?

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From The Ruckus Maker Mastermind this week:

Sarah opened her email on a Tuesday morning and felt her stomach drop.

Subject line: “Open to Transfer or Resignation”

The teacher (a former high school English star with “highly effective” written all over her file) was two months into teaching fifth grade math and having a full-blown panic attack at school.

She’d gone home early.

And now she was done.

Sarah’s principal didn’t blink.

“Let her go. We’ll figure something out.”

But here’s what made this decision brutal:

This wasn’t some lazy teacher phoning it in. This was someone who’d successfully taught 10th and 11th graders for years, led capstone projects, earned glowing evaluations ...

... who was now completely drowning.

Fifth grade math. Different content. Different age. Different universe.

And the math coach?

She’d been pushing hard on curriculum compliance, correcting the teacher’s use of “five and above, give it a shove” instead of teaching place value concepts, watching students bomb checkpoints, and cranking up the pressure.

No relationship. Just expectations.

The teacher sent the email. The principal shrugged. And Sarah had maybe 48 hours to decide:

Do you let struggling adults go when the numbers don’t look good?

Or do you fight for them when your gut says they just need the right support?

Here’s what made this harder:

There was a second fifth grade math teacher — also struggling, also likely leaving mid-year (military transfer).

Union rules meant if either resigned, they couldn’t be hired in neighboring counties for a year.

And the sub pool? Empty.

Sarah sat with it. The pressure to perform was real. The data looked bad. The staffing crisis was looming.

But something didn’t add up.

Most “performance problems” are actually diagnosis problems.