The Best Teacher Appreciation

It’s teacher appreciation week, which means that teachers all over (as seen in places like the Reddit teacher forum) are discussing what their districts do to appreciate them. I’ll let you check that out yourself.

Teachers are feeling underappreciated in many places, and nobody really knows what to do to correct that, or the fact that public education is facing a crisis of funding cuts, evaporating federal support, intellectually hostile leadership, and shrinking enrollments. Some of these things happen in cycles (in 2019, we were talking about how some people thought maybe we hadn’t built our high school big enough, and that was the year I began teaching, only seven years ago).

“This too shall pass” is good for some things, but not for others. And it doesn’t really help anxiety. There are teachers I know who have gone from extremely positive attitudes to (this year) “I can’t do this anymore.” And if you want to know whether people on the outside of the profession have an inkling about what’s going on, they may not get the full effect, but just choose to transition from whatever you’re doing into teaching and see what people say to you.

But this is about Teacher Appreciation Week.

The best teacher appreciation is professionalism.

The PTO in my town, the school committee, and the administration have made what I think are appropriate (and even substantive) gestures. I think an ice cream truck is coming today, Friday, on the day students have half the day off for Senior Prom. We had lunch provided yesterday. Also, yesterday, we were given the “gift of time” (a meeting was canceled), which – and I don’t know if this sounds silly – is music to a teacher’s ears. But the best appreciation is professionalism.

Teaching is chock full of indignities. You have to swallow your pride on an ongoing basis. This is why getting treated like a professional is a big deal. It says that the indignities are worth bearing for the professional mission.

For teachers who embrace professionalism, being treated as a professional is the ongoing appreciation that helps us push through the most difficult times.