here’s another one 
It was the first week of the semester and I was “warming up slowly”. For some reason I thought it would be OK to hang out late one night, and then half ass an assignment. My professor reamed me, slowly and mercilessly. It was actually embarrassing. He called me out hard, and somehow worked other students into it saying things like “it would be one thing if you were Scott, he sucks, but your actually good. It is like I gave you both $100 to invest, and Scott, the half talent he is, buried it in the ground, but at least I still have my $100 dollars, not a horrible idea. But YOU, you decided to burn the $100 in a fire last night, and now we have nothing!”
Anyway, after licking my wounds from the tirade, I threw myself into the next assignment. Just really cranked. The next week when it came time to crit, the prof says “who would like to go first?”, and I jumped up. He gave me a suspicious look, moseyed over to my project, studied it in detail, then said “very good, EVERYONE, this project is the bar by which you will be judged today, I hope some of you worked hard.”… now that was encouragement, because it meant something. When I did poorly, he dindt say “now Michael, whats wrong, did you want to go out with your friends last night?”, no, he practically killed me. The next week when I worked hard, he knew it, I knew it, and he let everyone else know it.