2.      See your students in a different light – Go to a football game, volleyball game, school play, choir concert, speech tournament, poetry reading, or any other extracurricular activity that your students participate in.  You will build mountains of “respect points” when students see you are willing to spend your own time to watch them outside of school.  Here’s another point builder:  Every once in a while, go to the cafeteria and eat lunch with some of your students.  You don’t have to stay at the same table for the whole lunch period, maybe you could circulate a bit and eat with three or four different tables for five minutes or so.  Just the gesture of eating, “hanging out”, and talking about non-academic stuff with your students can have a lasting effect.  I used to talk about everything from cars, golf, college football, the Jonas Brothers, knitting, making the perfect grilled cheese sandwich, tennis shoes, the price of gas, well…you get the idea.

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