Yes, there were at least ten things I loved about this semester.
#10. "Thank You"s
After I submitted the final grades for my IB class, I needed only to wait for select students to submit their English Honours Portfolio, an extracurricular project. I received the following email from Shaobin:
Hello Ms. Curious.
I finished correcting my essays for my English Honours Portfolio, and I just realized the amount of work you invested to correct them for me (especially in this time when you must be very busy with all other corrections). I would like to say "thank you" for your help and dedication.
Also, I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude for your wonderful teaching throughout the whole semester. I especially learned a lot from the class discussions, and I believe what we learned in class will accompany me for the rest of my life.
I will have the essays delivered to your office tomorrow.
Warmest regards,
Shaobin
In my Child Studies course, Fatima needed to leave early during the second-last class because she was flying to Syria that afternoon. Between oral presentations, she slipped her final assignment to me and whispered, "I really, really loved having you as a teacher."
I supervised some of the IB international exams, and before setting up for the last one, Marcel stopped me in the hall and pulled a book out of his bag. "This is for you," he said. It was Amélie Nothomb's Fear and Trembling, a novel about a young Belgian woman working for a corporation in Tokyo. (He'd mentioned it when we were reading Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen, and when I'd said I hadn't read it, he'd said, "Hmmm," and made a note.)
"Oh, so great!" I said. "But how will I get it back to you?"
"No, it's for you," he said. "I bought it for you in English because I don't know how well you read French. It's to thank you for everything, especially for taking care of those Honours Portfolios."
When Sasha dropped off her final assignment at the very last minute on the very last day, she threw her arms around me. "Thank you!" she cried. "Thank you for letting me graduate!"
Nonplussed, I returned her hug. "Well, we'll see," I said wryly.
"No, no, I need only twenty percent - I think I probably managed that. Thank you so much for everything!"
At the end of every semester, I need to write down all the good things, especially the "thank you"s. It's often the bitter moments that linger - the confrontations, the classes that went poorly, the sulky comments on RateMyTeacher.com - after everything else has faded. These bitter moments matter, and we can learn a lot from them, but some days we just need to remember that our classes are full of nice people who appreciate what we do. We need to place as much, or more, importance on them, because otherwise, we're suggesting their appreciation doesn't count for much.
And at the end of the line, this is what our jobs are about: a student who believes, like Shaobin, that "what we learned in class will accompany me for the rest of my life."
*
Nine other wonderful things:
#8: Blogging
#7: Looking Problems in the Eye
#6: Rereading
#5: Exceptions
#4: Harry Potter
#3: Early Mornings
#2: Incorrect First Impressions
#1: My IB Students
Image by Alistair Williamson
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Martha Nichols
Emily Holleman
Holly Robinson
Thomas Rogers
Cary Tennis
nolalibrarian
Salon.com
Comments
Runner up: Dove bars. Still on the hips of the staff today. :)
Hand-drawn stuff is the best. Right now I'm looking at the corner of an enormous card one of my classes made me; I've kept it for ten years, and it peeks out from behind my bookshelf to comfort me on bad days. (They also gave me a coffee mug with a tag saying "Please don't spill me" on it, because I used to knock my coffee over all the time. I kept it, with tag still on, on my desk with pens in it for years, until inevitably one day I knocked it over and broke it.)
I like reading this, someone who notices appreciating someone who notices.