Our hagwon lost two students between Monday and today that impacted me more than most of our recent losses. They were both "high maintenance" students, but in both cases I'd had personally put such a great deal of time and energy into them. Really, a "high-maintenance" student, in this context, means a high-maintenance parent (i.e. the paying customer). Both of them had very difficult, demanding moms.
So in a sense, in both cases, we (meaning not me but the home-teacher involved) essentially said, "ok, enough is enough," and let the students move on. At one level, this is exactly what I advocate for in my [broken link! FIXME] IIRTHW essays – not all customers have the same value, and sometimes it's best to decide a customer isn't worth the trouble (and thus isn't worth the expense in staff members' time and special efforts) to retain.
So I feel slightly hypocritical to be upset now that we've bid them good riddance. Except… well, except in these cases I was the one who invested so much of that time and special effort, and I'm suffering what the business school people call the "fallacy of sunk costs" – the almost unresistable desire to throw "good money after bad," or, in this case, to throw more personalized attention and love after already invested personalized attention and love.
Even acknowledging this error in my thinking, however, I have another thing that bothers me: although I know that the moms are (and have been) terribly difficult customers, I fundementally liked the students themselves immensely. I'm going to miss them terribly. Both of them were always bright spots in the days when I had them.