Chapter 2: Respect, Liking, Trust, and Fairness

I was taken aback by the answers that students gave about popularity. When some of the authors were saying they would rather have a really good teacher than a likeable teacher, I remembered how in high school, my peers would get excited if they had an easy or likeable teacher, and seemed to neglect the quality of the teacher. This chapter makes it clear that kids are just as interested in their education as the teacher is.

I guess the reason this surprised me was for some reason I’ve grown this social paradigm where students are supposed to prefer easy teachers to good ones. I suppose I always imagined students saw school in a short-term egotistical view and worry more about the present than the future. It’s certainly good to know that that’s not the case.