NEA: The Good and the Bad: Gift-A-Rama

November 2005

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The Good and the Bad

Gift-A-Rama!

'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the school, not a creature was stirring, not even the fool who steals candy from your desk. Sigh. That bad boy deserves a lump of coal, but during this holiday season you should find peace, respect, and a nice little something wrapped up in a big red bow.

By Mary Ellen Flannery

Five Gifts You Deserve:

Get out of town for some "professional development" at the School House, where you can work on your stress management skills, catch up on some reading, and practice relaxing in the double Jacuzzi. Once a schoolhouse, this historic red brick building is now an award-winning bed and breakfast inn in rural Missouri. Check into the Teacher's Pet Suite, toss on a spa robe, and tell your principal you'll need regular workshops here in the future. For more information, see www.schoolhousebandb.com.
You don't need any more peppermint gunk for your tired toes. You just need a good pair of shoes with arch support and shock-absorbent soles. Check out Dansko professional clogs at www.dansko.com. Popular with chefs and midwives, these shoes are made for walking among the desks and across the playground but also when standing at the board, marching around the cafeteria, and running to the loo between classes.
Let the angels sing your praises this year. When parents ask you what you'd like for the holidays, why not suggest they lavish you with words? A letter of appreciation, addressed to your principal, will be placed in your personnel file and serve as positive evidence of your good work. Keep your own copy for inspiration on the days you'd like to lock the classroom door before the kids come in.
When Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés landed on the coast of Tabasco, the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma II thought a god had arrived and so, naturally, presented him with cocoa beans. When you arrive at school, don't you deserve the same heavenly treatment? Let's hope your secret Santa goes for the best French bonbons at La Maison du Chocolat, www.lamaisonduchocolat.com, where the 20-piece chocolate collection is "presented in the correct order of tasting."
Love! Most of all, you deserve a little love, wrapped in a crooked bow and sealed with a kiss. These are the gifts that come straight from the heart and make you cry. Just ask Jennifer Koziolek, a Minnesota teacher. Three years ago, during her first pregnancy, Koziolek lost 22 pounds in the fall semester and frequently missed school for hospital stays. Naturally her first-graders were worried, and they showered her with gifts before winter break including one very special, hand-made blue blanket. "Dear Mrs. K: This is the blanket that I snuggled with when I was a baby. I wanted your little boy to have it so he won't be scared at night. Love, Zachary."

Five Gifts You Never Want to See Again:

The mugs are coming! The mugs are coming! Marching into your cabinets, falling into rows on your desk, shouting their cheery Madison Avenue mottos: "Teachers are the heart of learning!" After just four years on the job, a second-grade teacher in Berks County, Pennsylvania, has 20 or more mugs rotating to keep pencils upright. (Inconceivably, he neither drinks coffee nor tea.) Let's say he keeps at it for another 25 years, that's nearly one mug for every day of the school year!
Dead things are NOT good gifts. Some of your students do not understand this. They discover dead things and rejoice at their good fortune. A dead thing! What wonder! When they bestow this fortune upon you, take a lesson from Barb Hagerty at Amistad Elementary in Kennewick, Wisconsin. Last year, a second-grader found a "treasure" on his way to school and stashed it in his backpack for her. She gently explained that dead baby birds aren't sanitary keepsakes.

NEA Members' Best Gifts

Several years ago, Kathy Crain had a very difficult, emotionally disturbed third-grader the kind of kid who hid under his desk and didn't willingly do anything she wanted him to do. At the end of the year, he brought her a guitar - a sad guitar with strings hanging each way, most likely discovered in a trash heap. And it touched her heart. The guitar is now named "El Kabong" and it's awarded annually to the teacher at her school who has tried to make beautiful music in spite of the pitfalls in the way.

Holiday Savings

When you can't part with past gifts, you end up filling your memory banks - and every nook and cranny too.

In 1985, little Kerri gave her teacher a brass apple to hang on her Christmas tree. Ten years later, a fifth-grader named Nathan, who loved to dribble and shoot, wrapped up a miniature mouse, poised on a basketball court.

After 20 years in a West Virginia classroom, fourth-grade teacher Lisa Cox has collected so many holiday ornaments that she sets aside a second tree in her Cross Lanes house for the teacher stuff. That's in addition to the guest bedroom, ahem, "The Teacher's Collection Room," where she keeps the ceramic figurines, embroidered pillows, wall hangings, scrapbooks, Beanie Babies, stuffed puppies, and what else? Oh, how about a wooden box clock and a handmade quilt?

A whole generation of students, and Cox has never thrown away a single gift. She's swallowed some, sure. Teachers do love chocolate and, one year, a mother mixed up a jar of homemade cocoa for her. But each gift represents a child, a name, a smile, a story, maybe an adventure with spinach dip... (Don't ask! Just imagine a plate of dip, a teacher's chair, and one mischievous little boy.)

"I don't expect anything, but I do appreciate their gifts," Cox says. "These things mean an awful lot to me."

It's hard to pick a favorite, but last year's quilt might be it. Under the supervision of a parent, who had offered to "do art" with Cox's students, each child drew a square for the cheery red-bordered quilt. A penciled space adventure reads, "You taught me MATH, now I can reach for the STARS!" Another with a black dog traipsing across it says, "You're busy like a dog - Phoenix."

My favorite things

After 20 years, you're also bound to get a few, well, let's call them less attractive gifts - like a pair of boxer shorts. "I wouldn't have dreamed it!" she laughs. And how about a certain Bart Simpson souvenir that warns folks to "Just Say No to Crack!" - and it isn't talking about the street drug. It's talking about... can we say this in a family magazine?

No, says Cox.

And onward, she moseys through her house, opening cabinet doors to pick up treasure after treasure. "I got this last year," she says, picking up a basket with a covered bridge painted on its lid. "I got that," she continues, pointing to a jolly snowman, and she also got this, and that, and oh, that too.

"Teachers are real pack rats," she laughs.

Downstairs in the basement, on a shelf above her tools, 18 mugs are hanging on wooden pegs - just a small sampling, of course. One is from San Francisco, where a vacationing student was thinking of Miss Cox. Another says, "Short people stay dry the longest in a rainstorm."

Yes, that still makes her chuckle.

Back upstairs, Cox finally finds her favorite, if she has to pick one, or two, or three. Actually, it's four times that Cox has been nominated by former students for Who's Who Among American Teachers, in 1996, 1998, 2000, 2005. The book's publishers ask promising high school students to name their most influential teachers - and four times it seems that West Virginia's finest have reached back into their memory to their fourth-grade year.

"To think I had that much impact back then, for them to remember me," Cox says, "that to me, is what it's all about."

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