Responsibility

One of my biggest struggles is helping students understand their responsibility in learning. Too many of them show up in my class expecting me to just hand them everything on a silver platter and that they won't have to do anything. And then when they do poorly the first person blamed is the teacher.

At some point in the year I like to sit down with my classes and talk about their responsibility as a student and mine as a teacher but it doesn't always help like it really hasn't this year with one of my classes. Even when I'm soliciting the information from students, they still see it as coming from an adult. And of course we all know that adults know nothing, right??!!

I guess I'm just at a loss as to how to approach this problem. I hate to see my students not doing well. But there is only so much I can do if they aren't pulling their weight.