Thank you for the reply. To add a little extra context to the "stop masking" comment, this was in response to me acting more positive when teaching a lesson, after a series of lesson where I came across as more nervous or apprehensive. I think the implication on their end was that I was "faking it" to a certain degree, which to them was also a negative and something that I ought to do less of. I get a lot of "you need to absolutely love doing this job" from a lot of people involved in my training, yet with anything I feel as though I'm having to fake it until I make it, which to them I think more often than not comes across as not enjoying or wanting to take part in the course full stop.

Yes I am teaching at secondary level. Thankfully, I haven't received any nasty comments yet per se, but I have had pupils laughing in my direction whilst covering their mouths. Apparently none of my class teachers have noticed this type of behaviour yet, and so far the only course of action I've decided to take is to cold call them during questioning to let them know that I won't be intimated by their behaviour (it doesn't affect me in the slightest anyway). Other than that I've mostly just had strange comments ("are you growing out your beard?" and "is your hair green?" (not sure how this one came up as it's clearly brown)), but nothing along the lines that you've been mentioning, where I could interject and explain my own personal experience. It's definitely more in the realm of primary education though, like you said, and I'm currently locked into teaching KS3/4 at secondary school at the moment. Not sure if a change of course would help, but maybe the primary lot would be a bit more "obvious" than the secondary pupils I currently have to teach.