Anyone Here Who Teaches for a Living (or Did)?

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Are there any Aspies/Autists on here who have or at one point did have a teaching career? If so, what was it like? I plan on becoming a teacher myself, so I can't help but ask just to get an idea of what it might be like for an Aspie.

Not me. Teaching is on my list of jobs to avoid. Mostly because I hate children.

I am an assistant chemistry professor at a university. It is a mixed bag at that level. I love the teaching aspect of the job (helping students learn), but hate dealing with the politics of the job. If you do go into teaching, be prepared to put in many more hours than a typical 40 hour job to get everything done right. It is difficult sometimes, but the reward of seeing good students progress in their learning can be worth it.

I kind of have the same question, but I already have a teaching license. I knew nothing of Asperger's diagnosis when I chose my major, and I thought perhaps I just needed more training and exposure to people to feel "normal." Well, I got all of the exposure I could have ever asked for as a substitute teacher once I graduated, and it is a very difficult job for people who have limited social skills, especially when you are dealing with children; I majored in Secondary Education.

These are all of the things I wish I would have known before getting into it:

Your profession is super open-ended, and you are not given a suitable level of guidance if you don't know how to ask. People often assume I know what I'm doing until I fail. Then, they just assume I don't know how to do / am not really interested in the job. Very few people actually offer help, regardless of what they lead you to believe.

You are not given a script or book of lesson plans. You are expected to learn how to be responsible for all of this during student teaching, and you have to pull a lot of what you do out of the air. When I first started my major, I was under the impression that your lesson plans were neatly laid out for you, and all you had to do was follow the script and add your own personality. Oh, how wrong I was!

You will NEED volunteer experience to find a job. Again, no one told me this. I was under the misguided impression that student teaching was all of the experience I would need. I was very surprised when I got into the classroom and discovered I did not know how to navigate. I only found the materials and advice I needed when I started volunteering and expressing interest.

You don't really need to major in Education to become a teacher. There are so many alternative routes to certification that you can become a teacher with virtually any college degree. Major in any STEM field, and the board of Education probably has a route to teacher certification for you. Major in anything else, and if you have a decent command of grammar, you can find a job teaching kids overseas. Basically, an Education degree is a waste of time and money.

Your social skills / or lack thereof, will be tested daily. If you decide to work with kids or teens, they will try to interact with you, ask you questions, and do all of the stuff that, personally, drives me sort of crazy. They will also pull all of the awful NT stuff, like accepting how you appear or judging your level of confidence before deciding to listen to you and follow you. Having to find ways to connect makes the job at least twice as difficult as it should be.

So, there you have it in a nutshell. To recap, you will be given very minimal training. Teachers are not basically classroom actors with scripts and ready-made lesson plan booklets. You have to purchase, create, beg, borrow, and steal, and develop those things yourself.

Communication is VITAL. Teachers cannot exist in a vacuum. You have to communicate constantly with parents, staff members, pupils, and administrators.

Your students are wells of untapped potential, but the little beasts WILL NOT voluntarily cooperate with you to help you make the job easier. They will fight you tooth and nail, because they are trying to look "cool" and preserve their social "status." Fighting with students and having to come up with ways to curve bad behavior is honestly the most frustrating (and necessary) part of the job. I honestly feel like people with better communication skills would not have this problem. From what I've learned from experienced teachers, it's a mind game. You have to find the ring-leaders who start the problems, isolate them, and find some kind of motivation, whether it be positive or negative, appealing enough to make them want to stop disrupting your class. You also have to do this early to establish your authority. The students will become resistant if you try to take control after letting misbehavior slide.

Teaching kids really pushes you out of your comfort zone, forces you to learn how to communicate, and teaches you a lot about human behavior and non-verbal communication.

Oh, and you will have almost NO free time while you are learning how to do everything the first year.