Should I quit my teaching job?

[Emptytreeswhisper]

Ten years teaching. I have been battling with this for at least 5 years. I absolutely love the classroom and the children. I'm part time so my planning workload is actually fine. Most of my colleagues are lovely.

But. I hate my boss. I have had to get the union involved over various things. I am autistic and she cannot understand why I might find some things (like talking in person) more difficult than others do.
Other things:
My job share teacher is quite bossy and sometimes i feel like a supply teacher in my own classroom!
I hate subject leadership.
I hate leading assemblies.
I hate organising and leading trips.
I hate the paperwork for SEN and the interventions we are under pressure to do.
I hate the negativity and nitpicking.

Basically my job is two sides of a coin - one I hate and one I love. So i find it very hard to pull the trigger and leave. What would you do?

The good bit, I agree. But micro management, nonsense paperwork and endless observations are terrible. I did manage to go my whole teaching career without doing an assembly though.

That's like a hairdresser saying they like doing hair, but hate talking to clients, answering the phone, sweeping up and booking appointments.

What made you think you could have one part of your job without the other?

This is rude.

Nowhere has the OP said this thread is exclusively for teachers.

25 years full time teacher here : So you hate the main part of the job but love the easy part of the job - standing in front of chn and teaching ? Quit. Teaching is no place for people who only want the glory without doing the real leg work .

15 years a teacher here, and I couldn’t agree more. I guess I’m what you could call ‘neurotypical’ and I don’t particularly like doing assemblies either, and certainly don’t particularly enjoy the paperwork side, but like the vast majority of teachers, enjoy being at the chalkface.

Become a tutor! It’s the best bits of teaching without all of the shit. Being self-employed is so much better than working for some dreadful SLT too.

This.
If the negatives of any job outweigh the positives… surely just no/brainer!
Look for s job you enjoy …. 😂

Surely if you are autistic you understand that the SEND paperwork and interventions are vital for the support of that child? I mean I wouldnt take up previous suggestions of moving to alternative provision and definitely not special ed if you dont like those things as paperwork for sure is like 80% of the job!

Have you thought about EYFS? You tend to get forgotten about and there aren’t any break duties, assemblies or residentials to manage!

Sounds like you are not really suited to what teaching actually is - rather than the small subset of bits of it you like.

Your manager will have realised this - and, (sadly) is probably hoping you choose to leave.

I agree with the majority of pp that you sound unsuited to teaching. I say that as someone who has been teaching for over 30 years and also as an autistic woman.

I do sympathise with you over having a difficult job share. If that was the only problem, you could just ask to work with someone else next year but you seem to hate tasks that are intrinsic to the job and rather than just moaning about them (like most of us do) you seem to think that your autism should excuse you from them.

You mention repeated run ins with the head teacher but give no examples of what the head has said which gives the impression that you have unreasonable expectations of what reasonable adjustments should involve.

I had my own autism diagnosis as an adult (very late and after I had been teaching for many years).

It helped me understand things such as why I found sudden, unexpected changes (even for very small things like children sitting in a different position for assembly) very stressful or why I like working alone in my classroom over lunch rather than going into the staffroom (helps me to decompress when I'm peopled out).

It's given me the confidence to say no to things that don't affect my teaching eg we had a drumming session once as a team building activity as a small part of an INSET day. I found it overwhelming so asked to go and get on with some jobs in my classroom instead.

But I don't try and get out of anything that is important eg I don't mind talking to parents face to face but I have always found phone calls very difficult so used to hate phoning parents. I had to do it so just pushed through my discomfort. Now, I have done it so many times that I'm ok with it.

I think that you either carry on with teaching, acknowledging that there are aspects you dislike but which you need to do as they're intrinsic to the job, or you switch to something like tutoring which only involves the aspects of teaching that you enjoy.