Teachers' Treasures

Bethesda's Lexi Derrickson presents a card and homemade cookies to her teacher, Kirsten Crabtree. (James A. Parcell -- The Washington Post)

"You are forever taking care of me and helping to clean up my messes," he wrote in a note that accompanied his gift. "The next time you use the towel remember I appreciate everything you do for me!"

So many teachers and so many stories about kids who could have been written off but weren't: The Michigan girl who thanked her teacher in a card for treating her the same as the popular girls; the Florida girl, previously a slow reader, who was grateful for being encouraged to read great books; the boy from east Tennessee whose stained hands handed his teacher a sack of black walnuts; the emotionally disturbed boy in Oregon, constantly underfoot in homeroom, who presented his homeroom teacher last week with a light blue resin moose, whispering in her ear that he had paid for it with "$2 of my own money."

Ellen Berg, a middle school teacher in St. Louis, keeps a cheap plastic jewelry box in her home as a reminder, she says, "to keep trying even when it seems all is lost."

Rodney Kennedy, a mischievous kid with whom she had her share of battles, gave her the box two years ago, wrapped in newspaper. "He brought it to me while everybody was working," she recalls. "He sat and watched. I could tell it was important that I like it." Their relationship improved over time and so did Rodney's schoolwork.

The next year on a Sunday morning, sometime between when she was reading the newspaper and doing her grocery shopping, Rodney died after being hit by a car the previous night. Berg learned the news Monday in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

In the days that followed Berg hammered herself with questions. Had she treated Rodney respectfully? Had he felt safe in her classroom? The jewelry box suggested to her that she had and he did.

Sometimes boosts come years after a student has graduated.

Elizabeth Reynolds had been teaching middle and high school in Lansing, Mich., for 10 years when she got a phone call a couple of days before Christmas from a former student, by then in her early twenties. The young woman asked Reynolds to a holiday dinner and when Reynolds arrived, about 70 people had gathered to tell her thank you, many of them former students.

Reynolds was stunned because most of these guests had been labeled the "burnouts" at school all those years ago. The boys in particular had been pranksters, unloading crickets down the drop box at the school library, hanging hundreds of women's half-slips from the ceiling on the last day of school.

As they toasted their favorite teacher, they filled Reynolds in on the good lives they now led as autoworkers, lawyers, doctors, mothers and fathers.

"In teaching, we don't always receive immediate gratification or even an occasional thank-you," Reynolds says. "But times like this particular evening make it very worthwhile for me."

Lexi Derrickson need not have worried about Crabtree's reaction to her present, which was accompanied by a piece of white typing paper, folded exactly in half, on which Lexi had sketched a manger scene.

"Are these angels on the card? I love homemade cards!" Crabtree gushed with the signature enthusiasm of young teachers. Then she popped off the Tupperware container's top.

"Did you say these cookies have peanut butter in them? I love peanut butter!"

Would that we all had a third-grade teacher to give gifts to at Christmas.