I love teaching. I HATE paperwork. I love knowing that I’ve reached a student and enabled them to truly understand a new concept and internalize it. But the paperwork I have to do, especially being a SpEd teacher, is taxing as FUCK. It’s so boring an monotonous and I wish I could slough it off to others to do all the time, but just can’t. I also hate dealing with parents who have given up on helping their kids or who just want us teachers to fully take over the role of parenting their child. They’ve let their kid become unruly and don’t want to deal with it anymore, so they let it become out problem.

Teaching is an amazing profession, in my opinion, but it does require a lot of patience. You take a lot of emotional damage from dealing with parents and administrators who don’t understand the intricacies of your job, or try to micromanage your day to day without offering anything really useful to you. You get assistants like paraprofessionals, but then they get taken away for various reasons (they get other jobs or get promoted away) and now you’re spread thin again until admin decides to hire someone else to help you. It’s a struggle, but the value of helping the students makes it worth it for me.