First comments! Woo-hoo!

Thanks to Teacher Lady and Graycie for stopping by! TL: I'm a real chickenshit about kicking people out. Or imposing discipline of any kind. What I do is shrug off all kinds of inappropriate behavior until I Just. Can't. Stand. One. More. Thing. and then explode with rage. I need to come up with a better strategy than that.

Graycie: Major props to you for teaching high school. I've thought about doing that--the pay is actually better than what I'm doing now, and at least there's benefits--but I don't think I could handle it. I hate, hate, hate dealing with discipline and attitude problems, and in high school that kind of thing goes with the territory. The good thing about so many of my students being first-generation college students, they usually don't attend straight out of high school, and wait until they're a little bit older and ready to settle down and take their education seriously. They may not have internalized much about appropriate classroom behavior, but generally they aren't going out of their way to make trouble.

All of my stories so far on this blog have had to do with BCCC students, but I really have a lot fewer attitude problems there than at BCMU. The BCMU students are at the branch campus because their high school record isn't that good--but they still see college as an entitlement, just what you do between high school and real life, so they don't see any reason to work any harder than they did in high school. The BCCC students, on the other hand, know that they're going to have to somehow develop better work habits if they want to improve their situation in life.