What if Actually Takes to Teach (And Why Half of You Should Not Be In That Classroom)

I have been an educator for twenty-seven years. I have been a neurodiversity coach and facilitator for ten of those.
And in all that time, I have developed one unshakeable, non-negotiable belief about this profession: if you do not actually like children, please, for the love of all that is holy, go and do something else with your life.
You would think this goes without saying. You would be wrong.

Requirement One: You Have To Actually Like Them

I have met so many people over the years working in schools that I have genuinely, silently, wanted to ask: "What are you doing here? Why is this job? You do not seem to like children very much." Not just tolerate them. Not just manage them. *Like* them. *All* of them. 

All shapes, all sizes, all volumes, all the ones who ask nine hundred questions and the ones who won't make eye contact and the ones who cry about the wrong colour cup.

The children I teach become *my* children. That has never changed in twenty-seven years, and it never will. 
If a child walks into your classroom and you see a problem to be managed rather than a person to be known, you are in the wrong career. Full stop.

Then There's Neurodiverse Learners, which Is Indeed, A Whole Other Level.

Teaching in general asks a lot of you. Teaching neurodiverse learners, and learners with a PDA (Pervasive Demand Avoidance) profile specifically, asks something else entirely. 

It asks you to unlearn almost everything traditional teacher training gave you.
Working as a neurodiversity coach and facilitator in schools across Cape Town has been some of the most rewarding work of my life. It has also, on certain days, been enough to make me want to walk straight out of the staffroom and never come back.

Here is what I mean:

I have sat in Grade 1 classrooms with three separate punitive systems running at once. A break time subtraction chart. A naughty room. A penalty box. In a room full of six-year-olds. 

For learners on the spectrum, and especially for PDA learners whose nervous systems read demands and public consequence as genuine threat, this isn't discipline. 

It's a recipe for shutdown, meltdown, or a masking performance so exhausting the child comes home and falls apart on the parents instead, which — trust me — is exactly what happens, every single afternoon, in homes all over this city.

There should not be three punitive systems in that room. There should, frankly, not be one.

Movement breaks. Sensory breaks. Fidget tools, chewelry, wobble cushions, a corner with a beanbag and permission to just be for four minutes.

 When a teacher denies these — when a child asks to move and is told to sit still, when a stim toy gets confiscated because it's "a distraction" — it is not just unkind. It tells me, immediately and completely, exactly how much that teacher does not know. And in 2026, in a profession that has every resource imaginable available to it, not knowing is a choice.

But Here's What Actually Gets Me:

Not the outdated behaviour charts. Not the confiscated fidget spinners. What gets me, every time, is the teacher who refuses to collaborate.

I walk into a school as a facilitator with one purpose: to make things easier. I am not there to judge, to catch anyone out, to add to an already impossible workload. 

I am there to show, practically, how to weave an autism-affirming, PDA-informed approach into an ordinary lesson — and how much calmer that classroom becomes when you do. Fewer meltdowns. Fewer disruptions. Fewer parents emailing at 9pm.
It genuinely, measurably, makes a teacher's life easier.And then I am met with a petulant, arms-crossed adult who argues with me about inane, unimportant things because their ego cannot tolerate being shown a different way. I am genuinely speechless every time it happens. Every. Time.

So this article is for that teacher. The one who thinks they already know it all. Lady - you don't. None of us do. I have been doing this for twenty-seven years and I learn something new most weeks — from the SIAS process, from CAPS accommodations, from a WCED circular, from a nine-year-old client who explained his own anxiety better than any textbook I own. 

Teaching is lifelong learning. If you are not open to that, this was never the profession for you, and you should most certainly remove yourself from any school — anywhere in this country or beyond — that specifically caters to neurodiverse learners.

 Those spaces deserve people who want to keep growing. Not people who peaked at their teaching diploma and decided that was enough.

What It Actually Takes:

So — what does it take to be a teacher? Patience most people don't have. A genuine, uncomplicated love for children, all of them, on their worst days especially.
What does it take to teach neurodiverse learners well? All of that, plus humility.

The willingness to throw out the sticker chart. The willingness to be shown something new by a facilitator, a parent, or the child themselves, and say "oh — okay, let's try that" instead of crossing your arms and arguing about nothing.

It is not impossible. I watch teachers get it right, beautifully, all over Cape Town every single week. But it does require something a worrying number of people in this profession seem to have run out of: the willingness to keep learning, and the humility to admit they still need to.