Kirsten, Yeah, its hard to break an unfavorable student perception that occurs early on in a class. Your post seems to suggest that if we are adamant about our "picture of preparedness and organization" regularly and especially at the beginning stages, we can limit the unfavorable student perceptions to some degree. To that I'd agree. Of course its easy to say "be that way all the time" which we can strive for but in reality will probably miss some days, but getting the expectations set from the get go will diminish the frequency of unfavorable perceptions. Barry Westling