Ann
REI Dome Tent
$250 Pottery Barn gift certificate
$100 Bookstore gift certificate
New Overhead projector
$150 gift certificate to Wild Ginger
Gretchen
Scented candle
"Best Teacher" coffee mug
Hershey's Chocolate Bar
Hershey's Chocolate with almonds
Scented Candle set
While Ann teaches at a public school, she teaches in the gifted program, which caters to the wealthiest families despite the school's attempts to attract a more diverse population.
Now that I teach in a private school the comparison on my side has changed a bit. This year I received $100 gift certificate to REI, a fountain pen with my initials on it, a basketball (we play every recess, so it was a great gift), a $25 gift certificate to Starbuck's, and 3 scented candles, though they were purchased not at the local drugstore, but at Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel.
The best gift, though, was 6 summer orders of organic fruit delivered right to my door every 2 weeks. We received the first delivery yesterday afternoon. A fruit box filled with plums, necatrines, peaches, a mango, strawberries, and bananas sat on the front step when we arrived home. We made a fruit salad for dinner that I ate again for breakfast. If we want, we can go online and change the order to fruits and vegetables, or just vegetables. The delivery comes with recipe ideas and information on how to live more organically...driving your car less, composting, and ways to recycle.
The family who gave me the gift also gave me a huge package of environmentally friendly toilet paper and tissues as well as a roll of duct tape.
Practical. Useful. Perfect.
Of course, after eating all that fruit, I know what the TP is for...
Still, I find the act of gift-giving at the end of the year an interesting case study in the sociology of schools and the psychology of my students and their families.
For instance, there are students who I know have very little money (especially after the whopping tuition costs, scholarship or not) and give these amazing gifts...gift certificates mostly, but still they are for sizeable amounts of money...money I know the families don't have.
Then, there are students who don't give any gifts...not even a card. That's fine with me. I don't count the days to the end of the school year because I know gifts will arrive, but I do find it curious WHICH students don't give anything, even a kind word.
One such student is a girl we weren't certain would stay at our school. After insisting that the girl be tested for a learning disability, the results came to us at the end of the year. Where I assumed something like asperger's, the results diagnosed a new "processing challenge" that I can't even remember the name of...which actually sounded a lot like asperger's. The result is that the student struggles (mightly) with any abstract thinking, preferring linear, patterned work like worksheets, memorization, or single-answer questions. While we do some work with memorizing, we rarely handout worksheets or short-answer, chapter driven assignments. Needless to stay, the student struggled throughout the year. Despite our multiple offers to help her after school during Homework Center, she rarely asked for help, rarely stayed after school, and never used a tutor to help her with her assignments.
The mother was hostile, angry, and distant from the beginning of the year and with our request for testing, never really did warm up to us until the very end of the year when we insisted on a meeting to discuss whether or not our school was the best school for her daughter.
It was not a surprise that a gift or a card never arrived.
But then there's the other student whose family makes tons of money, who we spent more than our fair share of time with counseling her academically, behaviorally, and socially, and never once was there a thank you let alone gave a card or gift.
Organic values...whole foods, whole child. There are fundamental values some families practice and other families don't. I have yet to figure out the pattern of which families are thoughtful and which families are too overwhelmed or self-involved to actually acknowledge others around them. There's no pattern in terms of money, there's no pattern in terms of race or religion or even sexual orientation. It's just this randomness; the chaos theory of socio-economics.
Next year, I think I'll make a predictions half-way through the year as to who will give a gift and who won't; who will give the big-ticket items and who will give me one more candle or mug or cheap chocolate bar.
For now I shall enjoy my delivery of fresh fruit, play some basketball, and go to the Starbuck's up the street...(I've already used the REI money for a new pair of shoes and lightweight jacket!)...and write my thank you cards to those families.
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