Students more than anything else need growth, intellectual growth, maturity, solidness, and growth in personal virtue.   Hard stuff.  Takes happy struggle and beginning again, with teachers providing stretchy encouragement.    Teachers shoot too low "and want to love them". 

But "loving them" should mean more than hugs and smiles, it means bringing them closer to the good, getting them to more fully develop their virtues and skills and gifts in the image of "perfectus Deus, perfectus homo", that is Jesus Christ.

And if it's a secular school, we must still strive to bring them closer to their perfect form...gifts fully realized in order to serve the world (mainly their eventual family), but not themselves. because then they will be much closer to God, who gave them their gifts, and that "nearness" (whether it's poetry or in differential equaltions or in car maintenace) brings them closer to God, which is for their own good.