A foundation of which Oscar winner Emma Thompson is president gives annually Teaching Awards in the English regions, Northern Ireland and in Wales too.
The aim of this awards is to recognize how important it is the work that teachers do every day at schools and provides the opportunity that students, parents and community celebrate with teachers their daily effort. It is more than only celebrate a teacher appreciation day.
The ceremony has been celebrating since 1998 and it is hosted by BBC presenters.
The process is simple: someone within the school community nominees the teacher and add a endorsement from the headmaster of the school. Next the nomination is judged by leading educationists and former Teaching award winners. Finally, winners receive their award in regional ceremonies held all over UK during summer term.
A weekend for winners,including a gala, is held in autumn. During this weekend is performed the final ceremony in, which national Teaching awards winners, are announced is filmed and broadcasting by the BBC turning that day in teacher’s day.
The appreciation that teachers can feel by being nominated is really important for them as Rhoda Edwards, a Teaching Awards winner, says : “Being Nominated for a Teaching Award was wonderful. The whole school felt valued and so proud. Pupils, teachers, parents, governors; we all felt that someone had made a special effort to turn around and say ‘well done’ what a fantastic feeling”
The teacher’s day is celebrated on first tuesday of May within the teacher appreciation week but the exacts origins are still unknonw and the actual date has changed through the years. Even today Massachusets celebrates his own teachers day on first Sunday of June.
It is believed that a teacher from Arkansas contact politicians and educational leaders in 1944 trying to find support to recognized how important teachers work is. Finally in 1953 Eleanor Roosvelt persuaded the U.S. Congress to establish a National Teacher Appreciation Week.
National Education Association describes this date as “a day for honoring teachers and recognizing the lasting contributions they make to our lives”. Usually students honors their teacher with appreciation poems , crafts or small gifts but it is uncertain where this custome came from.
Is it good to accept what every state senator says without questioning it? And moreover, can we believe everything they say? I am starting to doubt it after this spectacular interview of a high school student with AZ state senator John Huppenthal.
The student was asking a few basic questions about the subject of the massive budget cuts in education, especially the ones to Technical and Career Education funding. Huppenthal, on his website called as “one of the leading authorities on education issues”, talks during the interview about how important he thinks Career and Technical education programs are and how the cuts in the budget are “simply horrendous”. When the student asked him why he voted yes on the bill about the budget cuts in May 2009, Huppenthal asks for more information and starts to laugh nervously. Afterwards he stands up and says he will be right back but the young interviewer is still waiting for his return.
Alter talking about the Bing campaign last week, I want to highlight a noble deed from another huge company. I am talking about The McDonalds stores in Triad Aria who organised their own Teacher Appreciation Day two weeks ago to thank teachers for their outstanding performances in and out classrooms.
During the last week of school, teachers could get free breakfast at McDonalds on Wednesday with as result that dozens of teachers were standing in line to get a free breakfast sandwich and a drink. This is a small gesture but different teachers say that it means a lot for them to get these small kinds of recognitions. It shows that people in the community do appreciate the teachers and it feels good for them to know.
It is not the first time that McDonalds holds these kinds of promotions. For instance in the Triad Aria they raised more than 50000 dollars for local schools. This is a great teacher appreciation gift and teachers will remember this.
Bing is a web search engine that has been elaborated by Microsoft in 2009. With its new campaign the search engine highlights the importance of Teacher Appreciation, in combination with generating traffic towards their website of course.
The campaign starts of with placing an apple, a box of crayons, a pad of paper and a letter from Bing on the desks of teachers all over the United States. On the letter you can read that teachers spend more than 1.000 dollars out of their own pockets for their classrooms and that this number will rise with the budget cuts that are being executed. Therefore Bing says that it needs the help of the students to do something about it. Students around the whole world can share their story about a certain teacher on their website .In return, the children cannot only see their posts on a map on the website, but Bing also mails it to the teacher’s school and gives a 5 dollar donation for every post shared on the website.
I think this is a good campaign because not only does Bing get more attention but they actually do something good for our society. By expressing our appreciation, we can help our teachers to make the school a better environment for everyone.
We all know how big the influence of social media is these days. That is why I want to give you a few more good pages on social media concerning Teacher Appreciation.
First of all I want to take a look at the best pages on Facebook concerning teachers.
1. Teacher Appreciation Week: This is a group with over 3500 members. With its videos, pictures and stories, It’s probably one of the best groups you can find.
2. Another interesting group is Teacher Appreciation: with its good advice for different gifts and fresh ideas, the group could be interesting for you.
3. Furthermore, you have got the organisation called Teachers: here you can find different stories and more information about Teacher Appreciation.
4. The last Facebook group I want to share with you is called Teacher Appreciation 2010 and it’s specially designed for those students who had a great teacher and want the rest of the world to hear about it.
On Twitter you can find a good account called loveurteacher, which offers different tweets and has 139 followers.
On the 15th of May, students from South Korea, Mexico and Colombia celebrated their teacher appreciation by organising a couple of events.
In South Korea, there were a lot of events held in Seoul, the capital, on teacher’s day. For example, people gathered in an elementary school to read books to children at a certain school and on another school parents, students and teachers organised and participated in a sports event.
In Mexico teacher appreciation day has even been a national holiday since 1918. The Mexican teacher day is one of the top 25 teacher celebration days in the world. Many college and university students organise special parties for their professors and some of the universities also give out cash awards to teachers. There are also many public schools, in which students perform songs, dances,… to show their gratitude. Furthermore, one of the traditional activities is giving love cards to the teachers.
While in Colombia there are special school activities with songs, folk and modern dances, poems and other performances. Furthermore there are also some parties organised for teacher. But the teacher’s day celebration is not this important as in other countries:
As you can see, every country celebrates this special day in their own way with their own habits. We all feel the urge to give something back to our teachers. As long as we all know that we need to respect them and show our appreciation, it’s fine in whichever way we do this.
Today is the last day of a week full of celebrations. Teacher Appreciation Week is ending and we all had a very special week.
Everyone did their best to express their gratefulness and appreciation towards their favourite teachers and we all made a beautiful week out of it. We will remember this week for a long time. From Monday until Friday, students all over the US surprised their teachers with gifts, songs, performances and “thank you’s”, With Tuesday 4th of April as the absolute highlight.
Teachers are recharged and motivated to give there best for a whole new year. We showed the appreciation that they needed and deserved and now we can go back to giving them headaches and sleepless nights which they will gladly accept. Because they treat us as their children and this week, we have shown that we treat them as our second parents.
So let’s already think about how we are going to surprise our teacher next year, because I know that they will keep on doing the great job that they have done in the past years.That’s why I want to end this week in the best possible way.
A couple of weeks ago, I received this e-mail of a person called Brian Asselin and he told me the following story:
“My name is Brian Asselin, I am a musician living in the Ottawa (Canada) area currently finishing up my education degree at Ottawa University. I came across your website and thought I might drop you a line because I feel one of the biggest reasons why I have chosen to be a teacher myself is because of the continual support I received from my teachers of the past. In fact, I wrote a song dedicated to those teachers who continue to inspire us everyday.”
He also gave me a link to the song and this is the AMAZING result: enjoy
I couldn’t imagine a better closure of a great week filled with joy.
Today, May the 4th has been declared as Teacher Appreciation Day and that is why I want to say congratulations to all the men and women who have dedicated their lives to engaging and teaching young minds. They all deserve appreciation for the difficult job they have by managing, teaching and educating all these children.
It is necessary to recognize the work en dedication of these educators by saying thank you, giving a gift or rewarding the many excellent teachers in schools. No-one will ever forget the influence that one or more great teachers had on our decisions and our lives. So it is also important to be grateful for the teachers who influence our children’s lives.
So I say thank you those teachers who have influenced our lives, thank you to those teachers who have influenced our children’s lives, thank you to those teachers who keep on trying, thank you to those teachers who never give up, thank you to those teachers who educate the economy of tomorrow, thank you to Teacher Appreciation Day for remembering me how grateful I am.
