Teaching in the Time of...2025

Teacher Appreciation 2025

I woke up in the middle of the night with Teacher Appreciation Week and Love in the Time of Cholera on my mind. Love in the Time of Cholera is a 1985 novel by Nobel Prize Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez about a long unrequited love that uses magical realism as an element of the story.

I know - odd combo - but “teaching in the time of” Executive Orders, state supported measles outbreaks, recurrent school violence, insincere post-COVID learning loss demands, and expansion of Christian Nationalist parental rights groups must feel like a longstanding unrequited love juxtaposed with the everyday reality of guiding and supporting students, in the midst of a supernatural, impossible reality. How else could teachers be expected to educate students when there are threats from the federal government of patriotic education and eliminating lunches for kids, during the everyday possibility of life-ending violence?

We observe Teacher Appreciation every year right before Mother’s Day in a pre-planned, but always sudden, burst of notes with effusive sentiments and inexpensive knickknacks, so that for the rest of the year we can all go back to a love-ignore-hate relationship with those who care for and nurture the becoming of our children. I realize parents and administrators who observe Teacher Appreciation are good, and well-intended people, I was and am one of them. 

Normally, I would mark the week with cutesy memes about great teachers and remind people to “appreciate” the teachers in their lives, and I probably will do that for the rest of the week, but this year the whole exercise feels sadly insufficient and hollow. 

The subtext of Teacher Appreciation now has all the markings of fantastical literature. Themes like: We love you, but only the idealized version of you. We love you but we blame you — for pretty much everything. Sacrifice yourself but don’t expect too much from us; all seem implicit in the world teachers inhabit.

I know —a grim view of what is intended to be a lighthearted happy observance—but frankly to pretend that we are in the old days when a sweet message in a childlike hand could fix everything is just plain ignoring the realities of the situation our teachers are in. To appreciate teachers with small tokens in today’s current conditions is so ironic that it has the smell of bitter almonds, the opening motif in Love in the Time of Cholera that evokes a time of deep sickness. 

And there’s every reason to see Teacher Appreciation as a version of giving flowers (camellias in Love in the Time of Cholera) which are ignored or returned as empty promises. 

If you genuinely have any small appreciation for the work and craft teachers practice of nurturing and facilitating brighter, stronger, more resilient humans, do let them know. Make that appreciation real with actions and defense of them.

Is there a chance we can go back to observing teacher appreciation sincerely, without irony, without it being empty platitudes? Only if we tend to the business of restoring their dignity and respect now and refuse to allow political and governmental abuse of them and their students. If we do not protect them from the menace of current conditions, we have no business giving hearts, kisses and coffee mugs.

So here is what’s needed for true Teacher Appreciation: 

Try to daily remember that another person (or few people) spends their days and nights doing things that will benefit you and your children, and try to treat them with consistent common regard and respect for their choice to do that with their lives, and the struggle it is in today’s circumstances. 

• Respect their expertise.

• Understand they do a low paying and thankless job because they believe in us all and want children to thrive.

•  When you hear ridiculous things about them, question the speaker with a little skepticism. 

• When you hear they don’t care or are soulless, spend some time with them to find out the truth. 

• Stand in the way of those who would abuse them, structurally and physically.

Make teacher appreciation more than a trite meme and a kitschy Knick knack. Champion those who make public education possible.