To show appreciation for your teacher is to notice their efforts and tell them how it made you feel at the time, it matters more than what may be expected.
By: Shaylin Bogart
Throughout a student’s career they encounter some bad teachers, mostly mediocre teachers, but if a student is lucky they’ll meet a great teacher that really made a positive impact in their life, due to this rarity it makes sending that email even more important to communicate how much they mattered and impacted your life.
Believe it or not, teachers are also human and need positive feedback from students in order to handle the stresses that working with students can present.
Alexa Barba-Tepper, the Assistant Principal who oversees student services and counseling, she said “I think it matters for you, young people, like your voice, your opinions they matter. We need that too, just like you need a pick me up every once in a while, to feel like what we’re doing is affecting peoples lives in a positive way.”
Talking to the teachers in your lives in the present or past to tell them that they matter and why is such a small gesture and yet, incredibly impactful to the teachers and staff members present at schools.
Small gestures are often much more significant to the recipient than the sender will ever realize at the time or even later on.
Nick Miller “My wife and I have dinner, you know, I vent all my teaching and frustration, and then she’ll be like ” You need to go take some letters out of your drawers and read them”. Right, ’cause that’s why I keep those drawers for when I, like, get down or frustrated to fill my heart back up, because this is a hard job, you know?”
Being a teacher or an administrator can be an incredibly hard and draining job for those brave enough to choose this as their career, to teach the new generation the basics of how to exist and function is society is such an integral job when it comes to the youth.
Yet, teachers are infamously underpaid and even mistreated by students and even parents at times.
These letters, conversations, or even emails towards great teachers you had could be some of the only aspects that keep teachers going while their job continuously gets undermined.
Back in December this year I wrote a letter to my 3rd grade teacher, Mrs.Borowicz, I remembered her in specific due to the fact that she was incredibly patient and kind with me and the other students in my class, even when I was not a particularly easy kid to deal with in class.
Mrs.Borowicz was one of the first great teachers that had a heavy impact on my life and the way I saw myself then, and now years later I still appreciate her patience and willingness to work with me, especially since not many teachers have that much patience as well as that spark, and so I expressed the way her teaching impacted me through something as simple as an email.
Which all goes to show that even when you think that your influence on others is insignificant or minimal, you never really know how other people’s lives changed because of your presence.
Nick Miller said, “And as a teacher we have to sort of think about our students. We have to think, where are they? And what can I assign to challenge them just enough to move them from where they are, to something more comfortable and more confident.”
Shaylin Bogart
Tags: opinion, redwood high school, redwood journalism, teacher appreciation, visalia ca
