I want my students:
1. To learn to love learning. To learn how to learn on their own. Tense Teacher (link here)says it better than me.
6. One of my teaching goals is… to encourage my students to think for themselves. Most of them believe that school is all about adults telling them what to do all the time, and while they publicly profess to hate that, the truth is that they’re lazy and would prefer that someone always tell them exactly what to do. That’s why I love teaching literature — most of the time, answers are often open to individual interpretation. In other words, everyone has to think for himself or herself
I just want to read that to my students.
2. To learn to communicate as an educated adult. I want no emails with "u" as u or "r" as r. I want to be able to read and listen to them clearly expressing themselves. My students do not realize that the first draft is just that: a draft. In order to be clear and concise, they have to work with the material they wrote.
3. To learn that there is a great big world out there. While that world is scary, it has wonderful and interesting things to experience and offer. Some of those wonderful and interesting things might just be their destiny. For example, I expose them to literature with points of view they may not have considered before or even agree with. But, the exposure can lead them done the road to be more rounded, tolerant, and intelligent than they would be without my instruction.
4. To learn that hard work will get them somewhere. The only way to succeed in my classes is to do the work. The only way to succeed in the world is to do the work. Some of us have to work harder than others. I want them to realize that's ok. Life is about the journey, not the destination.