A poor example, but a good lesson.

I recently saw an example of teaching that really bothered me. This is a person who constantly disrupts class to nit pick little things. Like if a student is trying to find a notebook in his/her backpack, she will stop class to say, "Ok, what's going on? Right, right. Well, are we okay now?" I feel like it's a really big waste of class time to disrupt the entire class and call out a person she perceives as disrupting the class, but who could have just found the notebook within ten seconds and the class would never have noticed.

This was a good lesson in picking one's battles in the classroom. I feel like you set examples with big disruptions and let kids know the consequences if they're going to be disruptive there on. But to nit pick on little things that do no harm, like finding a notebook that only has the attention of one or two students, is really counter productive in setting an example of proper conduct. So we need to be careful in picking our battles, so as not to exemplify the behavior we try to stop.