Never let them get under your skin. True story.

So I was a TA in class a few years ago (high school), and everybody knows that being a TA is 100% free labor. That is, you do your work, then you do the teacher's work, and you get the same grade as everybody else who only did their own. Our history teacher even went so far as to say his TAs didn't even both writing the unit test, because they'd already learned all the material. So you can imagine, I was a bit frustrated at the workload, especially when the other TAs got to do less of the legwork.<br><br>So I start doing less and less of it, and I tell the teacher that I need to work on my own assignments. And of course, he tells me that I'm not doing my job right, which I get. And I said, "I'm sorry, I'm doing my job. I'm just not doing all the extra stuff that I used to do." By which I meant, I'm not writing your lesson plans for you, or doing your grading, or whatever else. I still did the basic "TA stuff" like classroom management, book ordering, etc.<br><br>Of course, he wasn't really a fan of that, but he understood. He said something along the lines of, "Well, I guess you aren't really like my other TAs. I'll just have to adapt." And I was like "Yeah, you do that."<br><br>So flash forward, I'm in his classroom again, I'm a lead TA for the department, I'm in charge of organizing all the TAs, and he comes to me with a problem. He wants me to cover a lot more of the workload for him now, because the work that the TAs used to do is getting dropped on everybody else, including the department heads. And he says, "You know, you were right. I didn't really appreciate you as a TA. I just kinda assumed you would do all the work for me then leave, and everybody else would be like that as well."<br><br>And I said, "Yeah, I'm not doing that. We're not doing that. You need to get your shit together."<br><br>So now, I'm basically the TA manager, but I'm not really even a TA. I'm just the guy who makes sure that the department isn't too overworked, and I make sure that the teachers aren't offloading too much of their work onto the TAs. So if they need help, I make sure to help them. But if they're just being workshy then I make them do their own work.<br><br>And I'm like, the most important guy in the department. I do all the scheduling of TAs and the hiring of TAs, I do a lot of the administrative work that the teachers don't want to do. It's pretty great. And part of my job is just to keep the teachers in line. Like, I made the principal get his shit together, and now he doesn't try to pawn off all of his paperwork. Never let them get under your skin.