Gifts for Teachers Often Carry a Touch of Class
School gift-giving sure has changed since the days of the lowly red apple. Today? How about a purple bra?
This time of year, teachers--especially those in elementary schools--get all sorts of presents. Some come in ornate boxes from exclusive shops, others in bags from neighborhood discount stores. And some parents stay up late to bake cookies as gifts.
Occasionally, in their eagerness to please, youngsters just grab something from home. One teacher recalled getting “a metal box with some weed still left in there.” The child’s mother was quick to come to school to retrieve it.
Many teachers say the best gift is seeing their students learn--to love books, for instance--or receiving a simple hand-scrawled “thank you” note.
Jim “Slotsy” Schlotthauer, who teaches history at Nicolas Junior High School in Fullerton, said, “The nicest present I ever got from a student was a letter from a little girl two years ago. She wrote that she wanted to get me a present, but she was poor and didn’t have any money to even buy me a card.
“She said she appreciated everything I did for her, and she finished off by saying she wished I was her dad. She was a wonderful young lady, a poor kid, and I was an orphan, so I always identify with the underdog. That was the neatest gift.”
Wyteria Perry may have received one of the most risque holiday gifts to be opened in a classroom.
“All my kids know my favorite color is purple,” said Perry, who teaches second grade at El Cerrito Elementary School in La Habra.
“It was Christmas 1987, and I was opening gifts in front of the whole class. One of my kindergarten students, Jonathan, gave me a present, all nicely wrapped. I opened it, and there was a purple bra and panties. All the kids were just like, ‘Ooooooooh.’ I could feel myself blushing.”
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Suzanne Carr recalls a holiday season when her gifts moved her first to laughter, then to tears.
“My first year in 1995, I got a big three-wick candle, but the wicks were missing. They had been pulled out. We all just kind of laughed,” said Carr, who teaches third grade at Orangethorpe Elementary in Fullerton.
“The same year, all the kids, with the help of their parents, also gave me a quilt. Each student had signed the individual quilt squares and glued buttons to it and sewed it together--all without my knowledge. I don’t know how they did it, but they did. It really touched me. I was crying. It was really special and meaningful.”
Some teachers treasure students’ gifts for decades.
Anna L. Piercy, who teaches seventh- and eighth-graders at Lexington Junior High in Cypress, said, “I had a very quiet young man in class who gave me a red-and-white striped snow muffler 25 years ago. I still have it. I’ve skied with it. It’s the only muffler I have. That was very, very nice of him.”
Vicki Prelesnik, a fifth-grade teacher at Handy School in Orange, fondly recalls the year of the 14 angels.
“We were reading a story about angels as part of a language arts lesson,” she said.
“That Christmas, 14 students gave me an angel--I collect them. Each one matched the personality of each student. There’s one with a football, a funny one, a frilly one. They’re not supposed to bring gifts, but they do, and I cried. . . . They all sit on my bookshelf at home.”
Hand-made gifts have special value, too, even when the results aren’t quite perfect.
“I had this little boy who I was tutoring after school, and he hand-carved these pencils and a little stand for me,” said Trese Simmons, a kindergarten teacher at Trabuco Elementary in Trabuco Canyon.
“On the back of the stand, he carved ‘I like you,’ but he spelled it ‘L-I-C-K.’ I’ll keep that gift forever.”
