National Teacher Appreciation Week – If you can read this, thank a teacher!
National Teacher Appreciation Week – If you can read this, thank a teacher!
In any profession, there are top performers, middle-of-the-road joes, and bottom-of-the-barrel scrapers. With the ease and anonymity of social media, many in society tend to share and shout about the latter. For some reason, it takes a bit more effort to share and shout about the positive. Especially when it comes to teachers.
This week marks National Teacher Appreciation Week. Most of you know that I started my career in time management back in my teaching days, both learning how to keep my head above water as a new teacher, as well as teaching my students how to better manage their time. My husband is still a teacher, celebrating 20 years in the classroom. Needless to say, teachers are near and dear to my heart.
Great teachers pass on skills we don’t even realize…until we get older. Like…why eating food is better than eating paste, how to sit criss-cross applesauce, how to gather supplies and put them back, how to finish a task within a certain amount of time. Whether teachers do it intentionally as a lesson or by default to keep from pulling out their hair, and whether we soak it up or rebel against it, teachers help us to learn about organization and time management. They are our personal productivity consultants for the first 13 years of our lives.
As the end of the semester draws to a close, and we celebrate National Teacher Appreciation Week, I encourage you to say thank you to your children’s teachers. If you don’t have kids, say thank you to a teacher you love. We all know it’s a tough job, but did you realize that teachers have a 50% drop out rate within their first five years in the classroom? We always hear it’s a thankless job. But it doesn’t have to be. Here are some ways to show your appreciation:
* Look your son or daughter’s teacher in the eye and just say, “Thank you.”
* Gift your favorite teacher 30 minutes and ask how you can help them.
* Make a 5-minute appointment with your son or daughter’s principal and let the principal know why you appreciate your son or daughter’s teacher. Even better – ask the teacher to be present! (Teachers usually only get called in for bad stuff, so what a treat this will be!)
*Give your favorite teacher a gift card to Goodwill so they can purchase supplies for their classroom – or whatever they’d like to purchase there! They get more bang for their buck, plus the revenue from the gift card funds job training programs in your community.
*Give your favorite teacher a copy of my book, Less Stress for Teachers: More Time & An Organized Classroom. It will change their world!
*Take your favorite teacher out for a meal and give them 15 minutes to just vent – then talk about the good stuff going on in life.
If you know of a school that could benefit from stress relief, please forward this post to the principal or curriculum director. If you can’t purchase any books for teachers or don’t know who to share this with, but you want to show your support, I ask you to do just one little thing: Find a former teacher of yours who made a difference in your life and say thank you. That will make a teacher’s day!