I mean, the assignment was literally a command, "You have to respect someone", and carried the implicit message that they were to be grateful because they were told to be so. It follows, logically, that someone who you can rationalize isn't your teacher is not someone you are being commanded to respect.

In the same way that parents physically punishing a kid at home makes them go berserk at school, or the way that constantly scolding a kid for inattentiveness causes a child to grow up with ADD, demanding respect from a child is going to teach the child that:

a) respect is something I am commanded to do b) if I'm not commanded to respect someone, I therefore don't have to respect them.

There's something Japanese union leader Dennis Tesolat once said about companies that's a really good metaphor for managing a child's behavior: "when you tell a company 'minimum wage', the company hears 'maximum wage'." A lot of things teachers do to try to manage children make children harder to manage over time.

This essay is not at all the worst thing a teacher has done to a kid, but this is often the problem with teachers who try to "teach" respect to their students.

Every time I've met a teacher complaining about their children being brats, they were trying to demand respect from the kids. That's just not how it works.

It's a shitty assignment.