It's the lazy ones that get me.

I don't mind when a student doesn't understand something, even if I have to explain something four or five times. It's when a student makes no effort to pay attention, then blames people or things around her.

I have this one student, who I originally thought might be bright because she claimed to know a lot about computers (she didn't). She sometimes sits staring at to the front. Today, she was falling asleep in another teacher's class, so I nudged her to wake up, but she said she was bored. Mind you, she came in very late, missing half the class, and falls asleep within 10 minutes. She tells me that she's tired and that she was sleepy.

So she mostly sleeps through the other teacher's class. Then the next class, same thing. Here's comes the last class (mine), and she sleeps through more than half. Then when she realizes that she has to finish this work, she wakes up COMPLAINING about "all the stuff" that's keeping her from doing her work. "The computers not working right" and "The mouse is acting funny" and (my favorite) "You never taught us that". So I say "No, we taught this, you just didn't pay attention." We've been doing this work for a few days now, plus we did it in the first class, and the second class, and we just did it again. YOU sleep through it. And now I see you banging on the keyboard. That's your frustration messing you up, not the computer acting up."

Then she says "Ok, maybe I closed my eyes, but I didn't fall asleep. Can you just show me how to do this?" My reply was "No problem, I'll show you how to do it AGAIN, but you have to wait until I get over there. I have to help the people who had their hands up before you." She was upset, but what could she say? She was caught. As if I should drop everything for her because she suddenly decided it was important.