
I remember my first try at post secondary education. It was at a local college with poor parking. I can remember being frustrated with a lot of things at this school but the one that finally broke the camel's back was the parking. I ended up quitting because of parking; of all things. It's funny how you bring parking up in this course. We, as instructors, have quite a challenge on our hands to try and get to the bottom of student frustrations. In this course you talk about frustrations due to limitations. I've found one way to help reduce student frustrations and that is not to add to their frustrations by expressing my own. A good example of this is in a course I teach that constantly has limitations in lab. Sometimes the lab trainers can be in such poor condition that it's embarrasing to take students out to work on them. There are two ways to approach this problem. I can either whine about it or I can use it to my advantage by challenging the students to try and make the trainers better. In the latter case they get excited about bettering the previous class and we all leave lab feeling we've accomplished something.