Some background-
I was a teacher, now I'm a TA. The reason for this was that teaching put me on ADs due to stress, so I know what it's like to be stressed, feel trapped and just want out of teaching. I was lucky enough to have a partner whose salary made it possible for me to get out.
I am now a secondary TA. My job is to accompany children with additional needs of any kind to lessons in a large, mainstream comp and support them. Any time left over from my designated child or children in a class is to be used in general assistance to the teacher and other students. I am so much happier and feel so much better now. For the first time in ages I actually like my job.
However, one teacher has taken to sitting at the front of the room, frequently on her computer, posting some work on the screen at the beginning of the lesson then barely interacting with the students. Since I am the only adult in the room apart from the teacher, understandably anyone who needs help asks me. It's about as far from my subject area as you can get, I try but I find it very difficult to explain. They tend to ignore the teacher and go straight to me as they know I'll try to help, not just sit there at a desk and pretend to be running a class. I spent a whole hour today shuttling round a room doing my best to help and sometimes referring questions to the teacher when I really didn't know. She answered briefly, then went back to ignoring us. Quite a few students did virtually nothing. I told her but she didn't seem to care. This is not the only time this has happened.
I know from previous conversations with this teacher that she wants out. I don't know her well enough to know if she may actually be depressed. She is very over weight, not bitchiness, a pure statement of fact. I nudge into obese on a BMI chart myself. She is probably at the really dangerous end and maybe that's why she likes to sit rather than zip about a room. However, she gets paid more than twice what I do. I can't teach her subject and am not supposed to teach as I used to do, only support. (The one time a staff shortage left my old subject down one teacher and I took a class for the Head of Department as a favour, bearing in mind I taught for over twenty years, I got in trouble as a Level 2 TA is not supposed to be left with a class.) Yet I do the bulk of the work in the classroom.
I don't want to complain to the SENCO who is my boss or her Head of Department as I don't want to cause trouble. I think she could be depressed and need help, just as I did but I can't go on babysitting her class while she just sits there.