Teachers’ Day messages for your tuition 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. School moved at the speed of the class and you moved at the speed of me, which is the only reason any of it ever clicked. Thank you for the evenings, and for going a long way past what we were actually paying for.

   Continue writing with message 1

2. Happy Teachers' Day. You were the one who worked out what I'd actually misunderstood, instead of making me do the same sum forty more times. Nobody at school had the time for that. It changed the whole of that year. Thank you.

   Continue writing with message 2

3. Happy Teachers' Day. You kept me steady through the months when everybody at home was quietly panicking about the boards, including me. Thank you for that as much as for the marks. I don't think I ever said so at the time.

   Continue writing with message 3

4. Happy Teachers' Day. Two hours after school in a room with one fan and no realistic possibility of escape, and somehow I still turned up. Thank you for never once accepting my excuses, and for marks I'd not otherwise have got.

   Continue writing with message 4

5. Happy Teachers' Day. I still remember you finishing a chapter with me at half past nine because the exam was on Monday and neither of us was going to leave it half done. Your family must have been waiting. Thank you, very late.

   Continue writing with message 5

6. Happy Teachers' Day. Six of us in that room above the shop, one fan, and a rule that nobody left with a doubt unasked. I got the marks and the school got congratulated for them, which was funny at the time and seems less funny now. It was your work. I don't think anybody ever told you so.

   Copy

Writing your own

Say the year, the subject and the room. Tuition batches are small and also endless — six students a year for twenty years is a hundred and twenty people. The room above the shop, 2016, Physics puts them straight back in the chair opposite you, which no amount of warmth on its own will do.

Name the thing they did that school did not. That is the whole difference, and it is what a tuition teacher is almost never told: they had the time, they found the actual misunderstanding rather than making you repeat the sum, they stayed past nine because the exam was on Monday. Fees were involved and they cover none of that.