I am cursed with needing eight hours sleep a night, and sometimes you realise that there simply isn t enough time in the day. Children don t understand about tiredness, especially boys, who don t learn to walk rather than run until they hit Year 9. You have to work over the weekend, and you get no sympathy. You get long holidays, and with them, resentment from all your non-teaching friends and family. You become incapable of leaving your work at home, and spend the last few weeks of the summer pining for school, and hating yourself for doing it, and generally working yourself up into such an emotional state that by the time term starts, you re knackered again.
Children can sometimes be rude and arrogant.
Parents can sometimes be rude and arrogant. I didn t learn to take responsibility for my own learning until I was at university, but we expect children to do it from a very young age, and it s frustrating when you know that they really don t care about what you re teaching them. They can take and take and it doesn t feel like they re giving anything back. You ve got to be realistic about all of this, because teaching does have its down sides, and these can hit student teachers and NQTs hard. But there has to be a reason why I keep on doing it, and why lots of your colleagues have done it for 20 years or more - and it goes beyond needing to pay the mortgage.