Skip to main content

Teacher Gifts



Today is the last day of school before the Winter Break. It’s a good time to remember the far-reaching nature of our public school system. You may not have children. You may have sent your children to independent schools. It matters not. You will be impacted one way or another.

Yesterday I read a long thread on Facebook about several waves of illness in the schools right now. There’s influenza A and norovirus, I believe. And of course there’s COVID. Apparently in some individual schools the rate of illness is high enough for school admin to notify parents. 

When I was little the acceptable holiday gift for a teacher was one of those lovely floral handkerchief squares. (I don’t know what it was for male teachers. They were rare in my elementary years.) These days the range of teacher gifts is wider and I have fond memories of Target gift cards which I have written about before.

I think it’s safe to say that giving one’s teacher Influenza, norovirus, or COVID is not the ideal holiday gift. Given the nature of illness, that means giving it to their family, too. 

And they in turn may pass it along to someone who knows someone who knows you. Do you see where this is going?

There’s a physical health impact. There’s an emotional health impact. And there’s an economic impact as well. Sick people may not be able to work. People who miss work will have to spend less money in local businesses. Sick people will cancel restaurant plans. Sick people flood emergency rooms in local hospitals.

I’ve been digging around this morning for a quote I’ve used before. So far I am still looking so I’ll have to paraphrase: all the failures of our society eventually get pushed to schools. 

We don’t have adequate paid sick leave policy in our country so people go to work sick, and/or can’t take a day off to care for a sick child. Plus, we don’t have robust childcare options so sick children are sent to school. We don’t have adequate affordable healthcare options and the ones we have are fast disappearing. Add to that the recent attack on public health policy and it makes this December even worse than many others before it. 

In my opinion we should care about all of these people whether or not we know them because it is the right thing to do. At the very least we should be smart enough to realize it impacts us and care about that.

A Christmas wish? A December dream? A radical notion?

Close you eyes and imagine what you would like the next several weeks to be like for you. I bet that’s pretty much what our school kids would like, and all the hardworking professionals in our schools would like, too. How do we give it to them?

Ideas? Let me know.


Village Green/Town² Comments






Comments

  1. Julia A. McCreadyDecember 23, 2025 at 4:29 AM


    Please do not submit comments here. This function will be disabled shortly. Use the link above instead. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

F ³: We Are Not Entitled

  A college student went missing. His family and friends were distraught. The community was encouraged to be on the lookout and spread the word.  Days passed.  They must have been agonizing days for those who cared about the missing student. Thoughts that foul play had been involved cannot have been far from their thoughts.  Then, at last, the student was found. Alive. The news was shared with the public.  So. Much. Relief. A family had been reunited with their child. Even though we know that life is complicated, I think it is okay to accept this as a happy ending and leave it at that.  But the world of social media says no. For every expression of joy at the news came questions and even judgement. It became clear to me that some folks felt entitled to an explanation. They wanted the backstory. It’s as though they felt that, by enlisting the help of the public on social media, the authorities now owed them all the details. Television dramas often weave curr...
2 comments
Read more

Separate and Unequal

  Remember “Separate but equal”? Remember how that really meant that Black schools languished in  broken-down buildings without adequate heat or toilet facilities, with cast-off, ragged learning materials, underfunded and largely ignored? The Supreme Court struck that down in 1954. The evidence was clear that separate was not equal. Plessy v Ferguson had led to - - no, endorsed - - deeply unequal schooling and opportunities. We tend to think of Brown v Board as being purely about racial integration. It was not.  It was about the logical consequences of segregation. And they were not, not, not equal. The ruling in 1954 didn’t transform public education for non-whites into a land of milk and honey by any means. But it articulated some essential truths in a way that made including everyone a legal precedent which could be relied upon and built upon. It was better than what came before it but it rested upon unsteady ground. It did not necessarily change the hearts or minds ...
1 comment
Read more