Gratitude for My Children's Teachers - Kirsten | Learn English at EnglishCafe

My children and I were up late tonight , baking chocolate gingerbread.  The gingerbread is for their teachers.  Tomorrow morning the kids will make powdered sugar shapes on the loaves, wrap them up and take them to school as holiday offerings for their teachers, these people who care for them, guide them and teach them each weekday.  The cakes are baking as I write...they smell good, but, really, how could they measure up to the task at hand: letting our teachers know how much we appreciate them?

I was a "specialty" teacher.  I taught gardening part-time at my children's school, so  I was able to watch each of the classroom teachers up close in action.  It is hard to describe exactly what it is that makes a teacher of young children good at what he or she does, but like a good gingerbread recipe, there are essential ingredients.    

I believe the first ingredient is faith.  Faith in humanity.  Faith in our ability to learn and improve and to better ourselves and the planet.  And it must be an enduring faith because teaching day after day, year after year, is hard.  Both mentally and physically demanding.

The second ingredient is enthusiasm.  This is the thing you can't fake, and I believe it is related to curiosity and thus, intelligence.  If kids sense that a teacher is truly taken by the way letters make words, or by the way two chemicals interact, or the way the human mind processes and uses information...they will follow.  They will ask teachers for more and more.  Children are designed for enthusiasm and curiosity, so when they meet a teacher who has held onto that state of readiness to explore what this world has to offer, they feel it and follow.

The last ingredient is...magic.  Some kind of sprinkling of fairy dust on certain people who are just unique.  There is something about them and the way they communicate.  These are the teachers who delight in their work and delight everyone around, especially the students.  These are teachers who work so hard, for so little pay, and yet have no doubt that they are doing the thing they were put on this planet to do.   

The teacher pay scale in the US is abysmal, and dropping all the time.  Recent reports show that teachers weekly earnings are , on average, 14.3% lower than people in comparable professional occupations.  And the worst part is, that gap grows among the most experienced teachers.

I regularly hear speakers and consultants expound on what it takes to be a good teacher or how teachers should be educating our children.  Sometimes the advice seems completely disconnected from the day to day of managing 25 or so children with all their personalities and special needs...and that's not even mentioning the fact approx 50 parents per class see themselves as the teacher's boss.   

The point of this blog is that I am eternally grateful to my children's teachers.  They make many sacrifices to serve my children, our community, and society as a whole.  

There's the buzzer for the gingerbread.  I only hope the teachers can taste the gratitude in the cakes we wrap in gold paper and red ribbon and offer to them tomorrow.