Every teacher I know keeps a secret student miscellany, a dog-eared folder or a shoebox stuffed with professional validation; tangible evidence that the work we do truly matters.
I certainly have one: a large yellow shipping envelope stuffed with my students’ thank you cards. I’m not the sentimental type, but when it comes to these expressions of appreciation, I’m a mawkish magpie. They are, after all, the evaluations and professional assessments that matter most to me.
So this time of year, when people ask me for teacher gift suggestions, my default answer is always, “A nice thank you note.” But that response tends to irritate the person asking, and is usually followed by: “No, really. What’s a practical, useful gift for my kid’s teacher?”
I do have suggestions (scroll down for a list of ideas and websites for shopping). I also have a list that I hope will persuade you that the best gift really may not be something money can buy: I asked some of my favorite fellow teachers to recount the best gifts they ever received.
Katherine Schulten, a former teacher, now editor of The Learning Network, described her favorite gift in an email: “A super shy student who rarely ever spoke in class quietly handed me a typed and handbound book of original poems she’d written outside of class, just because I’d scrawled something encouraging on one of her early class assignments.”
Don Cannon, a retired English teacher, wrote that while he’s received his share of mugs, food and tickets, his favorite gift was “a bound collection of excerpts from narrative essays the students wrote based on our reading of ‘The Things They Carried’ with personal remembrances and thanks written by each student. It was awesome.”
Most teachers admitted to love of books, particularly books that mean something to the student doing the giving. I keep a special shelf for these tomes, and I will hang on to my copies of “Pink and Say,” “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” and “The Devil and Daniel Webster” until they are pried from my cold, chalk-dusty hands.
Emily Graslie, chief curiosity correspondent at The Field Museum of Natural History and host of “The Brain Scoop,” keeps a large yellow envelope, much like mine. Hers came from a five-year-old girl named Maggie, a fan Ms. Graslie took on a tour of the museum after she learned the girl was anxious about kindergarten. Ms. Graslie described the contents of her envelope in an email: “It contains My Favorite Science Things by Maggie: seven hand-drawn images illustrating such things as her favorite periodic element (oxygen), favorite chemical process (photosynthesis), and, lastly, her favorite science person, Emily Graslie — in a drawing of the two of us standing in front of a volcano, smiling.”
And then there’s the weird and wonderful. A cookie, baked and decorated to look like the cover of “84 Charring Cross Road,” nearly made me weep with joy because it was evidence someone was listening when I said it was one of my favorite books. Marsha Penner, director for undergraduate research in psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discovered her students were listening when, “One of my students who kept chickens brought me beautiful eggs in all different colors, collected that morning. Tied to the eggs was a bag of ketchup chips from Canada; I had mentioned in a lecture how much I love them. She remembered and got them to me, uncrushed.”
For purchased or semi-homemade gifts, coolmompicks.com has a great list of D.I.Y. teacher gifts from the class. The tote bag and clever memory jar idea were favorites among the teachers I asked.
If you want to go in slightly different literary direction, try OutofPrintClothing.com. They specialize in T-shirts, note cards and even phone cases decorated in vintage book covers.
Most teachers harbor office supply fetishes, and Poppin.com offers a little of everything anyone could ever want along those lines.
A few specific ideas for the science teachers out there: how about a Pi dish, or a math dish towel? If you really want to splurge on something unique, check out Elin’s Mouldy Miscellany of fungus- and bacteria-inspired creations. But really, a fistful of lovely wildflowers presented in a graduated Erlenmeyer flask could never go amiss with any teacher.
Perennial flowers are one of my favorite gifts because they return each spring to provide an annual reminder of a student, but Tatiana Kaminsky, associate professor at the University of Puget Sound, disagrees: “The gesture is appreciated, but I wish they’d stop. I have a serious brown thumb and it’s a bit depressing watching myself kill them (the plants, not the students).”
As much as I love all of these recommendations, my large yellow envelope contains only one type of gift: thank you cards. Some are in marker on faded construction paper, others in fancy calligraphy on crisp heavyweight bond, but all are dear to me because they are written in my students’ hands.
Whatever you choose to give, set aside some time with your children to slow down, take the measure of the school year, and thank the teachers who have added to its dimensions.