Appreciate the Teacher Week – To the professional and accidental teacher

I’m sure that most parents have hand delivered flowers and thoughtful thank you cards to your children’s teachers during Teacher Appreciation Weeks in the past. And they deserve that thank you. 

On good days, a teacher’s job in school is demanding, physically and emotionally and mentally. They are not only doing the job of teaching a subject, but also are nurturing the most important people in your lives for significant hours in a day. 

Right now, we want to completely and thoroughly acknowledge that teachers have been placed in a very difficult situation with this COVID-19 environment. Teaching from home is an upheaval of so much they do. (Just ask me. I’m doing the same thing at the university level.) It takes additional and heroic planning, adaptations, organization, and implementation, which all takes additional time and thought in order to provide meaningful content to students across virtual forums. This is uncharted territory and looks very unlike what a teacher does in a classroom. And then, on top of that, teachers deal with tricky, unfamiliar technology, internet interruptions, and software that freezes. 

Furthermore, in many cases, teachers are not only teaching your children, but they are also teaching their own and experiencing much of the same frustration as you, of helping with content outside their third grade expertise. They are also trapped in the same kind of difficult situation of trying to get their work done, as a professional, as well as staying on top of assignments, geometry problems, and writing prompts of the inhabitants of their own one-room school house.

So, as a recipient of those cards and flowers over the past more than 30 years, I send to all of you teachers out there virtual flowers and thank you cards for those of you who have taken on these new multiple responsibilities and challenges. It is not easy.

This thank you includes, you, too, parents. Those of you who are doing sometimes up to three jobs: jobs of being a parent, an accidental teacher, and in many cases, the job of supporting your family by working from home.

Here’s to you all of you teachers. 

I invite comments, suggestions, ideas. 

If you have questions that I might be able to answer generally, please email me. Please, keep in mind that this blog is for suggestions that may or may not work. Here is the disclaimer, professional advice requires much more in-depth information and contact and is beyond the scope of this blog.  email: gail.coulter@outlook.com.