Teachers’ Day messages for your professor

Six messages you could actually send

Continue writing opens that message in the card with the words already in it, so all that is left is to change a word and send it. The last message is the longest of the six, and it is the only one you have to copy across yourself.

1. Happy Teachers' Day. You were the first person to treat what I thought about the subject as worth arguing with rather than correcting, and that changed how I read everything afterwards. Thank you for taking a nineteen-year-old seriously.

   Continue writing with message 1

2. Happy Teachers' Day. Most of the degree has gone. What stayed is the habit of asking what the evidence actually shows before deciding what I think of it, and I picked that up entirely in your class. Thank you for teaching the habit, not the notes.

   Continue writing with message 2

3. Happy Teachers' Day. You gave me time in your office that you clearly didn't have, for a question that wasn't urgent to anybody but me. I've since sat on the other side of that desk and understood what it cost you. Thank you.

   Continue writing with message 3

4. Happy Teachers' Day. I never once managed the reading before a class of yours, and I suspect you knew that from about the second week. Thank you for asking me the question anyway and waiting while I worked it out badly, out loud.

   Continue writing with message 4

5. Happy Teachers' Day. I still think about the seminar where you told us you'd been wrong about something for years, and then explained why, in front of all of us. I hadn't seen anyone do that before. It taught me more than the course did.

   Continue writing with message 5

6. Happy Teachers' Day. You supervised a project of mine that was, in all honesty, not very good, and you took it seriously anyway — which is the only reason I finished it instead of quietly abandoning it in the last month. I've thought about that more than once since, usually while reading somebody else's rough draft. Thank you for the seriousness. It was the whole lesson.

   Copy

Writing your own

Name the course, the year or the seminar. A professor has taught cohorts rather than classes, and a warm note from an unplaceable name is a small sadness. One specific — the third-year elective, the viva you sat on, the paper you supervised — and they are back in the room with you before they read the rest.

Write about the thinking, not the marks. What a professor is most likely to have given you that nobody else did is a method: how to read a source, when to admit you do not know, what actually counts as evidence. Naming the method is a far bigger compliment than naming the grade, and it is also the harder thing to fake.