more random ramblings

I have just returned from Brisbane, where I went to see my specialist about my finger. This entailed a total of 12 hours of driving. Prior to that, I did 3 days of work, which involved a lot of mackerel trolling (and thus time to think). Therefore the comments that I am about to post have had a lot of time to stew.
Last week I spent a fair bit of time reading and watching some of the articles and videos that come with the course. Two that stuck in my mind were: the blog from America regarding the slaying of a monster, and its relationship to English; and a "YouTube" video on engaging students. For some reason I can't find them again, so I can't reference them. What did pique my interest was the fact the engagement video placed so much emphasis on students becoming disengaged and the slogans and comments that came from them to that effect. As we are a free market ecomony, this means that the students who make such comments, and don't try, will be harder to employ in the future. Who is to blame for this?
This is definately not trying to say that any means of engaging your students should not be explored, rather that if all reasonable means are explored, and there is no underlying learning difficulty, and they are still not interested, it is no one's fault but their own.
An example of this is shown with two people I know fairly well. Both were told in about grade ten that they would never amount to anything. One of them has won an Oscar for animation, and owns a large company in Sydney that produces advertisements, and has started doing feature films. (He is also fairly useful regarding emerging technologies that students of today could be using in the future.)The other came in the top fifty in the recent "Richest people in Queensland" feature in the Courier Mail. Both instances relate to the video about the person who identified the choreographer of "Cats" as a dancer. On the flip side of this, no-one will probably ever hear about the people who are identified as not going to amount to much, and then don't. This is an example of being able to adjust the statistics to suit your purpose.