Where's the Appreciation?

Last semester I worked several hours over my regular schedule by taking on three students who traveled extensively for my college's Kinesiology department. They are trainers for sports teams. We live in a poor county in a poor state, and the college provides support for high school teams in the area who can't afford them.


Anyway, these students met with me at odd hours all semester long, often requiring me to come in on Saturdays, or after 8 pm during the week. But they made progress, and I kept them up with the classes they were taking. At the end of the semster, all three of them had passed.


After the semester was over, all three went on to continuation classes, and 2 of them ended up in the same class. They stayed after the first class meeting this semester to tell their new instructor - a friend of mine - that I hadn't done anything for them. One actually said, "We had to learn it ourselves. He just gave us assignments and then graded them." The other said, "I can't believe that guy gets paid for being a teacher, because he made us do all the work."


Now my friend knows that their complaints are bullshit, and I don't mind that these yobos have bad things to say to me. But I can't live with this idea that after I did all of this for free, out of my own schedule, out of my own time, and for no money, that they wouldn't have just a bit of appreciation for it. How clueless is today's student about what it is we do?