If You Can Read This Post, Thank a Teacher

In case you didn’t realize it, next week is Teacher Appreciation Week. It’s worth taking some time to express appreciation to your favorite teacher or the teacher of your children. Personally, I am not in school at the moment, but I like to take this week every year to write a letter to one of my former teachers. I have found that even the teachers who do not remember me (it’s been a long time) are very touched to receive a letter from a former student. Everyone likes to be appreciated, and teachers tend to be underappreciated most of the time. They work hard. They are underpaid. They often spend their summers going back to school themselves in order to stay fresh and up-to-date in their content areas. They often use their own money to buy supplies for class projects (what if we expected office workers to provide their own pens, paper, and staplers? or if we expected firemen to invest in their own hoses? or if we expected cashiers at the grocery store to buy bags to put the groceries in? can anyone even imagine expecting college professors to provide paper, pens, and pencils for students?).

I have a special reason to appreciate teachers, of course, because many of them use a lot of self storage. Some teachers keep a storage unit dedicated to their old college textbooks, boxes of old papers (their own schoolwork and the work of their students) and class materials, boxes of clippings that were topical and connected with a class topic, once. That’s in addition to the stuff they store in their classrooms: materials related to upcoming chapters and units, seasonal materials, extra paper and pencils, art supplies, multimedia items such as audio and video materials, reference materials, cleaning supplies, lost and found boxes, “treasure boxes” full of small items to give out to students as prizes or rewards, you name it. There’s something wonderful about a teacher’s archives that make them different from the archives of any other professional worker–certainly different from the file boxes that get put in storage by lawyers, accountants, and bankers. A teacher’s archives are literally a labor of love.

It doesn’t matter whether the teacher is an elementary school teacher, a college professor, a high school wrestling coach, a martial arts master, a theatre director, or even that most maligned and underappreciated of all our teachers — a parent. Take the time this week to do some small thing to show appreciation to at least one of those people. Even if the teacher you choose is just a coworker who inspires and teaches you with his or her example — take a moment and write a short note, bring flowers (or donuts), or simply phone that person to let him or her know how you feel. Now is the time — do it this week.

If you can read this post, thank a teacher.

Tags: appreciation, archives, class, files, school, self storage, storage, teacher, Teacher Appreciation Week, thank you

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 1st, 2010 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.