One of my favorite newspaper corrections reads: “It was incorrectly reported last Friday
that today begins T-shirt Appreciation Week. It is actually Teacher Appreciation Week.” This
year, National Teachers Appreciation Week comes on May 5-9.

Teachers change the world one child at a time, yet they are sorely unappreciated. In 1985,
the National Education Association and National Parent Teacher Association set aside the first
full week in May as a time to honor teachers and show respect for their profession. In fact, every
day should be devoted to teacher appreciation and made a time to recognize members of the most
unheralded, labor-intensive, multitasking, exhausting, income-challenged and rewarding of all
professions.

During the presidency of Dwight David Eisenhower, James Michener, author of
“Hawaii,” “The Source” and other mega-sellers, was invited to a celebrity dinner at the White
House. In a letter Michener declined to attend: “Dear Mr. President: I received your invitation
three days after I had agreed to speak a few words at a dinner honoring the wonderful high
school teacher who taught me how to write. I know you will not miss me at your dinner, but she might at hers.”

A week later, Michener received a handwritten reply from the understanding Ike: “In his
lifetime a man lives under 15 or 16 presidents, but a really fine teacher comes into his life but
rarely. Go and speak at your teacher’s dinner.”

Teaching is the highest calling. Parents entrust their most precious treasures to teachers.
Almost everybody who is anybody was taught to be somebody by a teacher. Teaching is the
profession that teaches all the other professions.

America is a nation of teachers: There are more than five million teachers in the United
States. This includes about 3.7 million pre-kindergarten-to-12th-grade public school teachers,
about 400,000 private school teachers and about 1,670,000 postsecondary professors and instructors.

Teachers are not only a populous group. They change lives one lesson at a time. In “What
the Dog Saw,” Malcolm Gladwell states, “Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is
actually better off in a bad school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad
teacher.” Study after study shows that great teaching is the most important booster of student
achievement — of larger consequence than class size, money spent, the school building and
quality of textbooks.

I believe that an apple lasts a short time in the hands of a teacher, but a bit of wisdom
lasts a lifetime in the mind and heart of a student.

I believe that when you speak, your words echo across the room, but when you teach,
your words echo across the ages. Or, as Henry Adams, the grandson and great-grandson of American presidents,
put it: “A teacher affects eternity. No one can tell where his influence
stops.”

I believe that teachers deserve the nice things people say about them. Having been an
English teacher (an inmate in the House of Correction) for 29 years, I’m biased of course. To
George Bernard Shaw’s mean sneer, “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches,” I would
oppose Lee Iacocca’s reverential “In a truly rational world, the best of us would be teachers, and
the rest of us would do something else.” Or I would quote Shaw himself: “To me the sole hope of
human salvation lies in teaching.”

Blessed be the teachers. Harmonies of scholars, mentors, counselors, coaches,
cheerleaders, traffic controllers, judges, sculptors, artists, interior decorators, janitors, nurses,
baby-sitters, comedians, clowns, tightrope walkers, acrobats and jugglers, they march in the
company of secular saints. May their tribe increase and thrive.

***

Chuck Burrough, of Escondido, has winged me a sentence that features four consecutive
instances of the word “had”:

All the faith he had had had had no effect on the outcome of his life.

Amazing, but here’s my version, which contains 11 consecutive instances of the word
“had”:

Mary and John are students in an English class. Here are the sentences they wrote:

Mary, where John had had “had,” had had “had had.” Had “had had” had the teacher’s
approval, Mary would have been correct.