That said...

Even though it looks like I have one person with a lot of problems that I will be having to deal with (this is also someone who doesn't seem to follow either written or spoken directions well), I do have a lot of good students.

Now, by "good," I mean something a little different from some faculty. Some of my "good" students earn good grades, but some of them are C/B students. Not the top of the heap. But that's okay. Because they're nice people. And they work hard in class. And they're polite to the other students, and try to help them out when they're having difficulty.

And a lot of them have interests outside of school...in one of my labs the other day, I was talking about a program I had seen part of on National Geographic, about "What happened if they drained the Great Lakes." (The title sounds kind of cheesy, but it was a really interesting program). And a bunch of them had seen it, and one guy knew quite a bit about the satellite/remote sensing techniques they used to predict what the lakefloor topography was.

And as I said, they're just friendly people. And someone who is polite to me and to the other people around them, that goes a long way with me. Few things make me tired faster than someone who's unpleasant, especially if they're doing it in the service of trying to get what they want. So I'm grateful for the polite students. I feel better after having class with them, I feel like we're less likely to be hurtling off a cliff, at least as far as the upcoming generation of workers goes. (Granted, a few of my students are non-traditional - the guy who knew all about the remote sensing stuff is probably in his 50s; he greeted me one day as "young lady," which made me chuckle, because I don't feel so young any more). But it is a nice thing to have positive interactions with students and I'm just going to have to look for that and notice it when it happens, to keep me on an even keel for when I have to deal with the Special Snowflakes of the world.