Am I wrong to want to Quit?

 See how familiar this sounds.

Your career is going well and you’re enjoying your teaching, you like the vast majority of the children you teach, you love your subject and the results are good, then it ‘s wonderful to think that you’re doing something special for the children.

Then one day it’s not going so well and it’s a different story. Let’s be honest, in any walk of life there are people who don’t like their job. But when you feel like that as a teacher, the problem is the guilt that feeling brings with it.

You think – I don’t enjoy this anymore- which often leads to the thought – but if I feel like this I’m letting down the children – maybe it’s my fault.

Once you start feeling like that, you’re on a downward spiral.

Well, you know, it is perfectly okay to not like teaching any more.

You’re not letting down anyone by feeling this way – the only person you let down is yourself because you feel guilty about it. The trouble I found was that while I could rationalise this, I couldn’t ever flick the off switch on the negative, guilty feelings, until I left teaching for good.

Teaching is hard.

It's hard when you're working in a school with a hardworking, intelligent, sympathetic SLT, who do their best to support their teaching staff as well as they can.

Unfortunately many of us were not in a school with an SLT like this.

With the best will in the world, teachers today face challenges and conditions more severe than we as a profession have ever had to deal with. To name but a few, the increase in parent power, the breakdown of any respect in society as a whole, and the increase in violent verbal and physical attacks against teachers are not something previous generations of teachers had to face. Yet the support from management, EAs and the governments of Wales and the UK has not kept step.

Are you wrong to want to quit? Well, bearing in mind all of the above , you tell me.

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