"she's 23, she's too young to teach, we should report her", I overhead this from some 6th graders this week.

I've been subbing for an elementary school during a couple of weeks (for a resource/orthopedagogy teacher), the cool thing about this assignment was that I had more than enough time to notice many things regarding the school culture and the kids.

As you may imagine, the average age of the teachers in this school was 50 or so, this means that this teacher was noticeably younger than most of them.

At some point, I had the opportunity to talk with the teacher I mentioned before, she was surprisingly mature, I could not believe she had only one year of teaching experience because in my eyes, I swear it looked like she had most of it figured out (this is probably not true but we can just say that she was highly competent).

Still, I realised that she was a little bit alienated, I never saw her talking with another teacher, she didn't even have lunch in the staff room and so on. I understand that teachers that don't exactly fit socially into the environment end up on their own but the fact that not even the kids seemed like they wanted her was really disheartening.

This is something I feel myself since I'm a young sub (31) and I'm a guy, sometimes I go to an elementary school and I feel unwanted there, from both the kids and the teachers. As a sub, it's normal to have similar experiences (they don't know me and I'm fine with that), but as a regular teacher that has been there since September? Wow.

I really feel bad for her now, something tells me that she will try to find a new school or something.

It sucks so much that in this profession people care more about who you are rather than your professionalism or skills, if she was 20 years older, people would respect her more, including students.