The two statements made here about some students coming in with a sense of entitlement and the one about using common sense really struck a nerve with me. I teach at a for-profit technical education school located in a city with a high population of lower-income students, many of whom see this as a way up out of poverty. I'm glad they're trying to improve their lives and make a better living for themselves and their children, but so many of our students come to us expecting our education philosophy to be the same as in the large public city… >>>

I like the idea of videotaping myself during class; I'm sure I'd see annoying tics that would be distracting to my students. I've had several instructors who repeated certain words or phrases (I hope they were inaware of it) that I found distracting. I remember one time, out of sheer boredom, I started counting how many times a particular instructor repeated the word "again" during a lecture. I quit after about a minute and a half because I was already up to EIGHTY!! Another instructor never "said" anything, he always "indicated," and in my most recent administrator's opinion, everything she… >>>