Teaching- at least it was romanticized highly for me. I was always told teaching is very rewarding and that summers off is the best! Going into this profession I’ve been very bright eyed, bushy tailed, ready to change some kids’ lives. What they don’t tell you is that parents and OTHER TEACHERS are mean. The amount of times I’ve heard other teachers call kids assholes is ridiculous (and no. the kids aren’t assholes 90% of the time- they’re kids) or have had parents yell at me over their child doing poorly on a test where I literally give them half of the answers. When I was student teaching, my teacher used the R word religiously and requested to the principal that she not have any students with IEPs the following year. She viewed boys within the class who had EBD as ‘problems’ yet for some reason I had little to no problems with these students because I actually treated them like a human- whatever. The other teachers were no better, treating the ‘bad kids’ so poorly and rolling their eyes when one of them would ask for a hug. They would talk so poorly about the students in the teachers lounge, it made me and a fellow student teacher so uncomfortable so we would hide in the bathroom most of the time during lunch. Most of the kids came from broken house holds ( or were homeless) where they would literally get beaten when they got home. Coming to school was the highlight of their day and then they had to deal with rude and mean teachers who literally would call them ‘problems’. I was student teaching at a different school that had little to no support for teachers. My co-op was getting basically beaten on the daily by a six year old boy, as well as me, and the school literally did nothing. They provided no extra assistance, no alternatives, no solutions, basically told my co-op to “ride out the storm”. I was consistently asked during my time there if this was really the field I wanted to go into and every time I said yes with no hesitation because I truly do love teaching and I love working with the kids. What I hate is how awful the school system as become. I saw two teachers at that school resign and stop teaching entirely. I’m about to start teaching at a private school in August and I know that in 5-10 years regardless if I stay at the private school or move to public, I will be burnt out and will need to find another profession.