Teachers’ Day messages for your teacher

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. There were forty of us in that class and about six who wanted to be there, and you taught it as though all forty did. I wasn't always in the six. Thank you for coming in and doing it properly anyway, year after year.

   Continue writing with message 1

2. Happy Teachers' Day. I could have got the syllabus out of a book. What I couldn't have got anywhere else was being made to believe the subject was worth the trouble, and that's the part that lasted. Thank you for teaching that as well.

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3. Happy Teachers' Day. What I remember best is how you treated the ones who were bad at your subject. You never let the class laugh at anybody, and you never made anyone feel written off. I've tried to run rooms the same way since.

   Continue writing with message 3

4. Happy Teachers' Day. You can be told now that we always knew when a surprise test was coming, and that nobody was ever genuinely going to fetch chalk. Thank you for pretending not to notice and teaching us anyway. Somehow it worked.

   Continue writing with message 4

5. Happy Teachers' Day. I still think about the day you kept the whole class back to finish a proof rather than leave it half done, and how nobody complained, which for us was unheard of. Thank you for caring about it more than we did.

   Continue writing with message 5

6. Class 12, 2013, the one by the window who asked too many questions about things that weren't going to be on the paper — I doubt that narrows it down much after all this time. Happy Teachers' Day. I'm writing because a fair amount of how I think came out of that room, and it seemed wrong that you'd never find that out.

   Copy

Writing your own

Say who you were, in about four words. A teacher of thirty years has taught several thousand people, and on 5 September the phone fills with warm messages from names that no longer attach to a face. Class 10-B, 2014, third row by the window costs you nothing and turns a nice message into a specific one.

Then say one thing that is not a compliment. Thank you for everything is what the forwards say. You never let the class laugh at anybody is a fact about them rather than a feeling about you, and a fact is the only kind of praise that survives being read forty times in one day.