Hello @Dr Pomohaci, I was teaching secondary school science and biology, and I kept telling my students that education is good; it's necessary for social mobility.   This was true.  But my students reacted most unusually. They gave me good advice.

First, they said, even a high school dropout can do some good business and make more money than a teacher. We have a flourishing shoe business in Seri Kembangan, Malaysia; and we have an icon, Jimmy Choo, who went on to be rich and famous in UK.  

The second thing that students said was that if education was good, why wasn't I going on to study my MS and PhD?  And I took that advice!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Choo

The hardest truth that I faced as a teacher was reading a murder confession in a student's class journal while teaching in a high school. Three days after a female student had been reported missing from our school, I read my student's story about how he had murdered his classmate. He described the murder in detail and revealed that another student helped him. He included drawings with the confession of the murder.  I did not tell anyone about the journal except the security officer at our school. The journal was passed over to the local police.  Within 24 hours, the girl's body was located in the woods near the school because of the student's description in the journal. The next day the police came to my classroom while I had the student in my class, removed him and handcuffed him outside the room. The student was charged with murder. The two students had taken the young woman to the woods near the school during lunch and murdered her and returned to school to continue their day. Months later, I was called in as a witness during the trial. It was tragic to attend the trial. I walked into the courtroom and saw the families of the victim and the murderers. I looked at them from the witness stand and all I could see were not one but three families that were devastated. My student was an honor role student with a promising future but now is in prison serving a life-long sentence. From prison, he wrote to students a series of letters that were shared among students and staff. The murder was a gang related order. He desperately wanted to be accepted by the gang. From prison, he wrote about how the gang had disappeared from his life after he was arrested. He said that his family were the only ones that stood by him during this time. He told students to never think that a gang is their family. He urged students not to be caught up in the gang life. Great words of wisdom but too late for him. 

Hello @Dr Pomohaci, I was teaching secondary school science and biology, and I kept telling my students that education is good; it's necessary for social mobility.   This was true.  But my students reacted most unusually. They gave me good advice.

First, they said, even a high school dropout can do some good business and make more money than a teacher. We have a flourishing shoe business in Seri Kembangan, Malaysia; and we have an icon, Jimmy Choo, who went on to be rich and famous in UK.  

The second thing that students said was that if education was good, why wasn't I going on to study my MS and PhD?  And I took that advice!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Choo

Dear Carmella Doty,

thank you for sharing your experience. Indeed the desire of students to be part of a social group can degenerate into such gestures. This is one of hardest truth a teacher can meet (of course in a few cases reaching this kind of extreme action).

Dear Miranda Yeoh, 

thank you for the answer. 

in Romania we have similar problem: often students put the issue more directly, Why go to school instead of make money?

There is a joke: a student leave high school and wants to find a job. And the student said to the employer he'd like a job where he can work hard and not have a very high salary. The employer says: for this kind of job you must have an Ph. D.

"Classic statistics is as magic." Certainly I believe that classic statistics is appearance but not clean truth.

• As a teacher in the university, I strived always to cover the subject matter in a particular course and the time is always not on my side. Because of this , I often fix extra time to cover up for these topics.  However, the students often complain that I over-burden them with lectures and do not give them room for other activities. Sometimes only a few of them turn up for these extra classes.
•  As a teacher,  I feel it is unfair to rush through the subject matter of a course due to  time limitation.  Am not also comfortable if I do not do justice to a particular course allocated to me by covering at least 95% of the course content

My hardest truth I got by a student was the message that one of my best students in the 80ties had an exident with motorbyke and died . I am stll heavily touched 35 years later.

Peter

I had a similar experience one of my former students died in a car accident was very sad for me and my group

In early 1970s, for a brief period, I gave free tuition to an economically weak and brilliant girl student of my neighbourhood, who used to top in her high school examinations and also secured high grade in the board examination. I expected her a bright career. Then I moved out of my native place/province for higher study and research for a long period (about 30 years). It was in late 1980s, I was shocked to learn from one of her batch mates that just after passing the high school, the girl (my student) was trapped by a gang of anti-socials who exploited her and finished her life. Even today, after so many years, I feel so sad for the student.    

I had a class that was very outspoken and would tell me like it is. But, when one student in the group told me to my face that some students were just downright disrespectful, I had to confront the truth myself. Later on, I discovered that a group of students in that same class wrote the department's director complaining that they did not want to be together with the same group of students in one class because they were disrespectful. Sometimes the truth is hard to accept.

Many thanks,

Debra

It was very simple: one of my students, I don’t remember very clear the year, looked at me and very honest he said: Teacher, I’m very sorry but your lecture is bad, boring and difficult to follow, it is just for aged people. Actually it was about the way I presented that time my lecture. Since then I’ve learned to use technology and some communication rules and everything seems to be all right. But at the moment it was like a cold shower over a hot body!

In some answers I found certain events similar to the events I have to deal through in my teaching activity. Other answers represent new approaches to the relationship between student and teacher. I thank you all for your answer.