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It's Teacher Appreciation Week!

Josie

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So you have to, ya know, appreciate me.

But seriously....

Please share your favorite teacher moments from elementary, middle, high and college if you wish!
 
Josie said:
So you have to, ya know, appreciate me.

But seriously....

Please share your favorite teacher moments from elementary, middle, high and college if you wish!
Click to expand...

We appreciate you!
 
K-12 was tough for me. Higher ed, on the other hand, was great.

Among the many great moments I had in higher ed, I will say that the ability to lecture about a topic for 2-3 hours is impressive as hell. My best moments were in the history department for undergraduate and graduate school. Having a professor talk for that long about Enricho Fermi and other pinnacle figures of the nuclear age was truly great.

Here's to the professors who actually lecture for 2-3 hours non-stop.
 
I've had really in-depth conversations with my college professors than I ever did my K-12 school teachers. Granted, I'm much less shy than I used to be back before attending college, so I'm more eager with getting help and stuff like that, or just having good conversations, like during office hours or whatnot.
 
Some of my favorite moments from being a teacher....

Dressing up like detectives to read mystery stories
Having a Camp Out Day where the kids learned how to identify animal tracks, made Smores mix and read in their sleeping bags with flashlights.
Wild West Day -- we all dressed up like cowboys/girls and learned about famous people from the Wild West.
Listening to kids read the stories they've written (some very memorable and LOL-worthy)
Poetry reading day -- I decorate the classroom like a coffee shop with snacks and drinks. Parents are invited and the kids read their poems at the (fake) microphone.
Brain Quest - class is divided into 3 groups and try to answer trivia questions correctly.
Teaching about historical figures in American history all year and then watching Night at the Museum at the end of the year and the kids yelling "Lewis and Clark!" "Teddy Roosevelt!" and "Sacagewea!" while watching.
When kids who have horrible home lives say they wish I was their mommy. *sniff*
Hearing a kid say "I can't read" and then pulling them aside with a book I know they can read and making a huge deal about it in front of the whole class to increase their confidence.
Seeing my former students now in middle school, high school and graduated who are still excited to see me and give me hugs. <3
 
Josie said:
So you have to, ya know, appreciate me.

But seriously....

Please share your favorite teacher moments from elementary, middle, high and college if you wish!
Click to expand...

I had a crush on Miss Hay, my kindergarten teacher. She had freckles on her face, just like me. I knew right away I would like her.
 
rjay said:
I had a crush on Miss Hay, my kindergarten teacher. She had freckles on her face, just like me. I knew right away I would like her.
Click to expand...

I had a crush on my 6th grade teacher. He was brand new to teaching, very good-looking and he called me by my initials which I thought was very cool.
 
I will say that I really do appreciate all of my professors for all of the lesson plan changes that they've had to put through this crazy time we're living in. One of my professors did cry on our Zoom call, because she was going through stressful stuff with her family, and we let her know how much we appreciated her, because she's been trying her besr to adjust to the circumstances of everything. Thankfully mine have been understanding and lenient to a generous degree in regards to grades and due dates, which I am very thankful for. I am done with my schoolwork, so it's over for me, and now I can just hope that this pandemic lessens it's course.
 

I've had a few moments where teachers cried in front of us. The first I remember was my 4th grade teacher who cried while reading us Bridge to Terabithia. Then in 8th grade, one of our classmates died. One teacher in particular couldn't even teach the next day because she couldn't stop crying. And in college, one of my education teachers was in the middle of her lesson and she just stopped and started crying saying she couldn't keep going. She had found out her husband was cheating on her, was in therapy for it and had just come back from a therapy session. We all hugged her and left class early.

And I cried in front of my kids when another student in the school died several years ago. The kids were crying, I was crying... so sad.
 
I had a college adjunct who came to class every week toting an ice cold 12 pack and offered anybody who wanted one some as he cracked his open.
 
Me 2nd grade teacher, I don't recall her name, had us all make colored hearts for Valentine's day. Pretty much everyone in class went with red but, since the hearts would be posted on the wall, I wanted mine to stand out...so I went with plaid. She didn't hang it because it wasn't "in the Valentine's spirit" or something.

Oh! Wait! I'm supposed to be appreciative....

Kindrgarten. Mrs Holmes class. Classroom next door to the boiler room in the basement of Woodlawn Elementary. We had a classroom production of the Three Billygoats Gruff and I got to be the troll!
 
I feel bad for teachers. Their salary sucks
 
Daqueef said:
I feel bad for teachers. Their salary sucks
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Not all of their salaries suck. Mine is great. Veteran teachers in my area make almost 2x the median income of the city.
 
Daqueef said:
I feel bad for teachers. Their salary sucks
Click to expand...

I'm sure it depends on your district but I have a few retired teachers as clients and between their 80% retirement and Social Security they are "stuck" living on $80-90k/yr. In one case the teacher retired from one of the local districts, went to work for an agency that contracts subs to various local districts, retired from that too and isn't going to be stuck eating beans and weenies any time soon.
 
Josie said:
I had a crush on my 6th grade teacher. He was brand new to teaching, very good-looking and he called me by my initials which I thought was very cool.
Click to expand...

Initials wooed you? Haha.
 
Josie said:
Not all of their salaries suck. Mine is great. Veteran teachers in my area make almost 2x the median income of the city.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it's kind of a mixed bag, depending on the situation and location. Is it necessarily attractive when you're starting out, particularly if you have a graduate degree? Not exactly. Sometimes it can look pretty unattractive. But it stacks with time.

And frankly, there are plenty of areas of the human service professional workforce that make less than teachers in a given area, with comparable education or experience levels.
 
When I was in the 8th grade, we had a history teacher that was an 80 year old woman. Mrs. Conner was her name. Everyday, for the last 20 minutes of the period she would read to us from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. You could've heard a pin drop in that room full of 13 year old heathens while she read that story to us.
 

I read that to my two daughters when they were young. I couldn't bring myself to say the n-word so replaced it with 'slave' whenever I encountered it. Same thing with Huck Finn.
 
rjay said:
I read that to my two daughters when they were young. I couldn't bring myself to say the n-word so replaced it with 'slave' whenever I encountered it. Same thing with Huck Finn.
Click to expand...

Mrs. Conner didn't use the N-word, so she must have done something similar. Half of the class was black kids.
 
Here's to my folks who taught all day and then came home to tutor my disagreeable teenaged ass. My wife has also mastered the art of herding cats as much as anyone can hope to in her classes. She's a great teacher. Teachers have my respect.
 

One of my favourite moments was outside school hours. I was looking through a shop when the shop assistant came up to me and asked me if I remembered her. Oh, I remembered her alright! What a piece of work she was...rude, disrespectful, did no work etc. She looked at me and then apologised to me for the way she had been in my class, told me that now she understood that I was trying to help her, trying to give her a future. She told me that she was going to go to TAFE and do courses to try to improve her life and her future and thanked me for the years I taught her.
Another moment was when a letter arrived in my pigeonhole. The letter was a thank you to me for teaching this lad. It was heartfelt and, while I simply don't do emotion, it nudged at my heart.
 

I wasn't big on grade school from 7-12, mainly because we had been transfered yet again, from NC to Pa, where I went from liking school to hating it! It was primarily because my southern accent DID NOT go over well, and I knew no one, so I immediately went from being fairly well liked before, to being somewhat of an outcast and loner at the new school. I made friends, but I still got occasionally bullied for a little over 2 years.

The problem was that my school had a zero tolerance policy to fighting, so defending yourself gets you suspended just like the bullies, and they rarely ever bullied solo! Besides, their parents didn't care if they got suspended! But my dad would've grounded me forever if I was suspended, regardless of circumstances! It ceased by 10th grade, but by then the social stigma was set in stone in the idiotic quagmire of high school social hierarchy!

So as soon as I reached 11th grade, I joined the cooperative diversified occupational program(CDO), which allowed me to leave school at 12:05 in 11th grade to go to work, and 11:20am in 12th grade. I kept the same job throughout. I still took mandatory college prep classes, but at that point I hated school so much that going back to school after graduation, was the freaking last thing I wanted to do! I regretted that decision a few years later(and still do). But that radical social change hit me hard, and lasted for several years. It had a profoundly negative impact on my self esteem at the worst possible age(pre-teen, pre-puberty).
 
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