Teachers' Treasures:
Some Gifts From Students Are Simply Priceless
Laura Sessions Stepp
Washington Post Staff Writer
December 19, 2002; Page C1
Lexi Derrickson, a Bethesda third-grader, labored for hours over her teacher's
Christmas present this year. Scratch cookies made from all the good stuff
-- flour, sugar, butter, chocolate chips, peanut butter and almonds -- are
not that easy to stir, she discovered, especially if you're staying with
your dad on weekends and he doesn't have "one of those blender things."
What will Kirsten Crabtree, her teacher at Wood Acres Elementary, think
about her gift? Lexi has worried about this for several days. "I know
she'll like the cookies. Well, actually, I'm not sure. I think she will
like them." Her round face turns momentarily somber.
Oh, the anticipation -- and agony -- of baking, sewing, painting or buying
a Christmas present for your teacher. Shaping candy cane ornaments out of
flour, sugar and salt, snowmen out of buttons, reindeer out of pipe cleaners.
Or standing in the shopping mall before endless shelves of bath products,
completely overwhelmed by the sheer variety of soaps, oils and powders.
What if your reindeer ends up looking like a dog? Does your teacher prefer
the scent of lavender or rose? What if that rich girl in the front row,
the one whose scrunchies always match her sweater and socks, gives the teacher
a day at the spa? The $5 mug you bought with your own money is going to
seem mighty puny compared with that.
Not to worry about the mug, teachers say.
Most of them can't get going in the morning without a cup of coffee, so
the odds are they'll be sipping from it long after Elizabeth Arden has faded
from memory. Affluent parents sending teachers to exotic places may grab
holiday headlines, but years after students depart from their classrooms,
the presents teachers remember most are those that came from the children
themselves.
Ruth Neikirk, a retired sixth-grade teacher, has a house in Arlington full
of such items that she brings out during the Christmas season: a little
angel needlepointed 20 years ago by a boy named Tom; a china shoe from a
boy named Tucker four years ago; a holiday banner of felt glued together
by a girl named Caitlin who is now a freshman at the University of Virginia.
During her 27 years of teaching, Neikirk made a point of writing on each
Christmas gift the name of the giver and the year. At least a month before
Christmas every year, her husband, William, feigning annoyance, pulls out
the boxes from closets on all three levels of their home and, after their
holiday display, slides them all back in. His load includes a box of gifts
that over the years have broken into pieces. Ruth tells herself every year
she'll repair them.
She makes no apologies for her collection. "I like having my students
all around me," she says.
Teachers have but to mention that they enjoy one particular thing, chocolate,
for instance, and by the time they leave for winter break they've gotten
so many Hershey bars and Godiva truffles that they're giving them away.
When they don't say anything they still can be surprised. Three years ago,
Lynne Kolkemeyer, who teaches with Crabtree at Wood Acres in Bethesda, was
delighted to receive a pillow that had been cut out, stuffed and sewn by
her student Melissa Longano and Melissa's friend. The pillow was not exactly
square and its stitches not exactly straight, but it made the hard seat
of her room's rocking chair a lot more comfortable.
Ginny Berkey, a middle school teacher in Eugene, Ore., was surprised one
December to find a white Easter mug on her desk with the saying "Never
count your chicks before they hatch." The student's mom dropped by
later that day to explain that her son insisted that it made a perfect gift
since the class had just spent four days discussing American proverbs.
The first year Alisha Colyer, a health instructor in a middle school near
Columbus, Ohio, was teaching, she allowed a student having trouble at home
to come to her room early in the morning to work in peace. "Last Christmas
he brought me a bag filled with wonderful things," she says. "My
favorite Pop Tarts, a Dr Pepper, some notebook paper and pencils" like
the ones he was always borrowing from her.
The item that really got to her was a towel.
"You are forever taking care of me and helping to clean up my messes,"
he wrote in a note that accompanied his gift. "The next time you use
the towel remember I appreciate everything you do for me!"
So many teachers and so many stories about kids who could have been written
off but weren't: The Michigan girl who thanked her teacher in a card for
treating her the same as the popular girls; the Florida girl, previously
a slow reader, who was grateful for being encouraged to read great books;
the boy from east Tennessee whose stained hands handed his teacher a sack
of black walnuts; the emotionally disturbed boy in Oregon, constantly underfoot
in homeroom, who presented his homeroom teacher last week with a light blue
resin moose, whispering in her ear that he had paid for it with "$2
of my own money."
Ellen Berg, a middle school teacher in St. Louis, keeps a cheap plastic
jewelry box in her home as a reminder, she says, "to keep trying even
when it seems all is lost."
Rodney Kennedy, a mischievous kid with whom she had her share of battles,
gave her the box two years ago, wrapped in newspaper. "He brought it
to me while everybody was working," she recalls. "He sat and watched.
I could tell it was important that I like it." Their relationship improved
over time and so did Rodney's schoolwork.
The next year on a Sunday morning, sometime between when she was reading
the newspaper and doing her grocery shopping, Rodney died after being hit
by a car the previous night. Berg learned the news Monday in the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch.
In the days that followed Berg hammered herself with questions. Had she
treated Rodney respectfully? Had he felt safe in her classroom? The jewelry
box suggested to her that she had and he did.
Sometimes boosts come years after a student has graduated.
Elizabeth Reynolds had been teaching middle and high school in Lansing,
Mich., for 10 years when she got a phone call a couple of days before Christmas
from a former student, by then in her early twenties. The young woman asked
Reynolds to a holiday dinner and when Reynolds arrived, about 70 people
had gathered to tell her thank you, many of them former students.
Reynolds was stunned because most of these guests had been labeled the "burnouts"
at school all those years ago. The boys in particular had been pranksters,
unloading crickets down the drop box at the school library, hanging hundreds
of women's half-slips from the ceiling on the last day of school.
As they toasted their favorite teacher, they filled Reynolds in on the good
lives they now led as autoworkers, lawyers, doctors, mothers and fathers.
"In teaching, we don't always receive immediate gratification or even
an occasional thank-you," Reynolds says. "But times like this
particular evening make it very worthwhile for me."
Lexi Derrickson need not have worried about Crabtree's reaction to her present,
which was accompanied by a piece of white typing paper, folded exactly in
half, on which Lexi had sketched a manger scene.
"Are these angels on the card? I love homemade cards!" Crabtree
gushed with the signature enthusiasm of young teachers. Then she popped
off the Tupperware container's top.
"Did you say these cookies have peanut butter in them? I love peanut
butter!"
Would that we all had a third-grade teacher to give gifts to at Christmas.
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