But with 60+ students, this self-examination can be exhausting.
And if you begin to micro-manage/criticize students, you risk them making them feel stupid. I have found that you have to do the opposite: you have to give them more freedom, more personal responsibility, and you have to challenge them to succeed. They have to own it. They have to have the agency to figure things out and ask questions. It's the only solution. You can't coddle someone to success.
Of course if this fails, I look like a shitty teacher. Teaching is hard. Managing is hard too, I am sure.
I teach middle-school students to be clear. At certain ages, yes students need a lot of structure and they can't figure things out themselves.
The most succinct way I've heard this massive cultural problem explained.
In ~2010, debt financing was incredibly cheap, so if the USA was able to take out debt at that time and use it for productive economic growth that paid more than the financing cost, it would have been a good investment.
The problem in my eyes isn't really that the USA took on debt when it was cheap, the problem was that:
1. it took out so much debt that now as those debts mature, they can't be paid off without taking on newer, much more expensive debts (and instead of treating that borrowing behaviour as temporary/uncertain, the government learned to treat it as a integral part of its budget).
2. the investments the USA made with that debt might not have been very smart investments. There's a huge amount of crumbling infrastructure in the USA that should have been prime targets for replacement in the era of low-cost debt, that are now going to be incredibly painful to maintain or replace, and aren't really optional. Yes, the USA did invest in a lot of things that boosted the GDP, but it's not really clear (to me at least) that the increase of economic activity was particularly productive, useful, or sustainable.
Sure, debt can be good idea when it's carefully considered and planned by a well run organization, preferably one where its leaders have their personal finances highly dependent on its success.
However the chronic issue almost every government has is that the government is neither well run, nor do the people running it suffer any financial consequences when things go poorly.
I don't have a realistic fix for this, of course, but it's fun to imagine annual performance reviews for politicians with guillotines available to HR.