The best, and I mean absolute best snd most respected instructors I have ever had, at any grade, at any level, have been the ones who legitimately gave a shit about all their students.
I was a TA and I quit after 2 years. Other TAs felt the same, though they'd never voice it and I chose to not go the professor route for the above reason. My mentors did care about all of their students and this is just not something I could fake. I'm 10 years older now, and I actually do care (private tutor now), but the kids I deal with privately are hand picked by me... the kids I get through my fall-back online companies (where they just come to you and ask.. well.. let's just say they don't come to learn) don't want to learn which is fine since that's not really what I get paid for and that's not why they come to me... ah the trillion dollar industry of education.
Being older does put things into perspective though.. Was my language appropriate for my attitude during that time? Yes, that was my attitude. Would it be the same now? Impossible to say but I can definitively say I turn away 9 out of 10 private students and my rate is 50-100/hour (this isn't much for what I do since I spend 3-5 hours of prep per each hour of tutoring)... but I only choose the kids who want to learn and not simply get an A.
Which brings me to the next point. You are misunderstanding me there. There were no classes of A, B, C students... in fact - we graded papers blind for this very reason. I gave a score, and my prof. gave a score. We only disagreed once out of maybe 500 papers and he wasn't even that harsh/didn't care about the curve (nor did I - that part was in jest... it always did end up being a curve though).
I am one of the students who got As and didn't give a shit by the way. Do you know what happened to me once I met my school's grading policy and a 12-body class, half of which was full of freshmen with perfect SAT scores (mine being at a mere top 10% if that)? I was fucked, we all were. You can be the smartest kid in the world, but when the professor can only give out 1 A, smart won't get you the A. You know what got me my A? I didn't think I would get it and I stopped caring about it and started to care about learning because I was literally humbled.
If you are surrounded by people where you are an A student who doesn't have to study and everyone else does, you are not really surrounded by your peers and you're not really pushing yourself to be anything beyond mediocre. But again, this is where you misunderstand me - I used these letters as ways to communicate. C simply means average to me. And there is a lot of average in every college - a lot of below average in fact (see Ivy leagues and their need to grade inflate over past 40 years, Yale esp. or Harvard which was actually fined for it) - and people who want that A - they're almost always an A- tryhard that burns out very quickly in the upper levels because as mentioned earlier, those profs. could give a shit about grades.. but the typical tryhard just learned 'enough' to get accepted and once there, they become surrounded by people who actually loved what they were studying.
Did you know that I failed math three times in college? - Of course you don't, just like you don't know how bad your students might actually have it
I knew all of the students who visited my office hours.. you'd never fail (or probably get below a B) in my classes if you visited me/my prof - that simply never happened.. did you know that?
My last stats student received a 24/100 on his stats test and an A in the course. I never gave up on him so leave your sappy shit at the door mate.
I failed my last 3 classes (I just stopped going one day) and went from a 3.9 to 3.6. I don't brag about my GPA because my GPA doesn't matter. Neither does yours. To be fair, based on that attitude alone, if you were in one of my classes back in that day, the focus on grades and the lack of ability to look at the big picture would probably get you the F and I probably wouldn't have thought twice about it. You can hate me for it like you hate the first 3 profs that failed you, or you can blame yourself and figure out what you did wrong.