What's It Worth?

What’s It Worth?

By Jonathan H. Gerard

I used to be surprised to receive gifts from my students at the end of the school year. I consider myself to be a terrible teacher some days. One term I collected newspapers for weeks and then finally handed out a pile to each group sitting around four tables in a tight classroom. The assignment: to make a collage around one theme that we’d been studying in class. Three groups, made of both boys and girls, did well. The fourth, made up entirely of 5th grade boys, made a fort and hid in it.

But there are other days when I feel more successful. Like a good grandfather, I try to make memories for the children. I tell stories, do a take-off-your-shoes and stand on the chairs lesson, create plays, host an annual cigar day with cut-in-half chocolate twizzlers… And every once in a while I treat the students like adults and talk to them from the heart and find that they actually pay attention.

My favorite gifts are gift cards to Barnes & Noble and chocolates. I used to get a lot of both. This year I got some, but also gift cards to Wal-Mart and Panera. A sign of the times? What I like most, of course, is when the student writes a little note with the gift, “I appreciate all you did to make class interesting” or “I’ll always remember the stories you told.”

It is said that, in college, one should expect to do two hours of work for every hour of classroom time. The same often holds for teaching young children. When you compute the time put into planning and creating before class and then grading papers and exams and re-evaluating one’s own work afterwards, teachers make about ten cents an hour. Or it feels like it. We deprive our own children quality time in order to be in top form when we meet with your children the next day.

Once, while teaching at Phillips Exeter Academy, where you literally live with your students, I went to Provence during the summer, thinking I’d get away from it all. Until I ran into a student in the center of Arles. Teachers can’t imagine a job where you just leave it all behind at the end of the day. It’s like having 25 different bosses every hour of the day—all demanding top performance.

When I was a student myself on Long Island, garbage men made more than teachers. Well, you have to have your garbage taken away. There’s famously no logic behind salaries. That’s why bankers, who create nothing, make more money than construction workers. And why some ball players make more money than brain surgeons.

But think about what it’s worth for someone to put up with your child on his or her worst day x 25. No, times 100 or more. Those gift cards and chocolates are a way to say you do appreciate your teachers—not only that they teach your child but that they care about your child. What’s that worth?