Any thing to break from the monotony of text book readiing and questions.  Students like a little competition and chances to engage with each other

You had me at respect...I didn't need to read much more.  I work with a pack of educational dinosaurs who show so little respect to our students partly because that is the nature of the trade we are in, novice really have to take a lot of lumps.  It is difficult to get some of the instructors to realize they are not on a work site, and that the students are not their employees.  There are some serious authority issues at my institution, very needlessly heavy handed and not at all polite.  My program director is widely disliked by the… >>>

I teach in an electrical lab, and we are always pressed to re-use material and it isn't fun to work with switches that are missing screws and wires that are not new but bent all around, so the students sometimes complain about how messed it everything seems, but simply reminding them that "That is what it will be like when you are doing remodeling work, things wont be complete, they'll be bent, screws will be missing...learning to solve these problems here is just as valuable as learning how to wire the circuits properly"  They get it pretty quick, but some… >>>

I take it personally too when students are not preforming well in my course, but I think it is important also to maintain a little bit of professional distance from these feelings in so far as, as this course has suggested, an institution cannot address all the different factors which put stress on a student and prevent attrition.  Sometimes I do not have the resources needed to help a student stay and school and succeed, be it time or physical resources.  There is a limit to what can be done, what one can committ to an individual student, and it… >>>