Chapter 2: Respect, Liking, Trust, and Fairness

One thing from this particular reading that jumped out at me was Mika's comments on page 19. Mika explained,
"It's OK if kids hate you at first. If you care about your teaching, we'll get past that. We're not going to be receptive to someone so quickly - we're kind of young in our thinking."
This basically made it clear that students are relatively forgiving, but have immature thinking. So if I am strict in my classroom, they will get used to it, and get over it, and like me because I care about my teaching. This is more of an achievement compared to being liked because I am nice, lenient, and an easy teacher. This surprised me because I thought the majority of high school/middle school students were more into having fun with there teachers and having no homework. She states that the students are young and have immature thinking; I would possibly disagree because if they care about their teacher quality, that seems to me to be a very mature step into the right direction.

This piece really helped me ease my worries of where the line is for being nice and having your students like you, or being strict and having them all dislike you. After reading this comment, and others similar to it, I realized what the children respect is the teacher knowing their content area and caring about it and the way its being understood by the students. Being liked has suddenly become less of a priority. I would much rather be respected in my classroom than liked, respect promotes success, the strong teacher-student relationships will develop if we have shared respect.