That class sounds painful. I studied once with a guy who'd just gotten a huge national award in Canada -- his second -- and his method was to shut up and pipe in at the end for a couple of minutes. Interestingly, he usually didn't just amplify what he said, but he did reiterate some most of the time.

Yeah, "teacher knows all" is an easy thing to buy into. It's a little more understandable where I am, as I'm the only native English speaker in that classroom, but I wish the students would recognize that they can learn a lot from one another -- everyone has different weak points and when they do try editing one another the results are great -- except they don't trust one another's editing. Argh!

My students are less of the "what do I have to do to get an A" and more of the "If I write much more, it's better, right?" There's a bell-curve enforced onto me because the class is over 20 students, and so they're all trying their darndest to stand out. Well, the people who still haven't learned to double space or to use paragraphs instead of point form -- things we covered on the first day -- are going to be on the bad side of the curve. (Notably, people who don't bother to double space are also the ones who don't spent much time on the homework anyway.)