You can have plenty of self esteem and resiliency and also decide based on evidence that an activity may not be the best use of your time. If you respect a teac

You can have plenty of self esteem and resiliency and also decide based on evidence that an activity may not be the best use of your time. If you respect a teacher's evaluation of your performance in a subject and the teacher's evaluation is that you don't have the maturity to learn from them, it may make much more sense to try other things than insist on forcing them to teach you anyways. People don't have to intend to say cruel things in order to be cruel-- for example, you don't have to intend to hurt someone who recently miscarried by talking about your successful pregnancy and its definitely not considered the fault of the person who is grieving. Similarly a professor doesn't have to intend to be discouraging in order to be discouraging.