Thank You for Teaching

I remember my kindergarten teacher, Madame Liliane. I remember her fondly, with the emotion we attach to good childhood memories. I remember her as a towering figure who seemed to have all the years in the world. I remember her as the embodiment of all memory of humankind as she mesmerized the small group of four and five year olds in the Ecole Jean Jacques Rousseau, a small school in Venezuela, with her stories about life in France, the country she and most other teachers in that school came from....

It was those memories, and the recognition of how much I had learned from Madame Liliane, that would cause me decades later to begin the acknowledgements of my doctoral dissertation at Harvard in this way: ‘To all my teachers, from Madame Liliane who taught me to read and write, to my doctoral advisor, Russell Davis, who taught me about educational planning’....

These personal experiences lead me to value Teacher Appreciation Week, a celebration in the United States resulting from the efforts of Eleanor Roosevelt in 1953 to honor teachers, and subsequently of the National Parent Teacher Association in 1985 to turn National Teacher Day into a Week. It is fitting that it was Eleanor Roosevelt who stewarded this movement for teacher recognition, as she had some years earliter stewarded the inclusion of education as a universal human right in the declaration which was adopted by the United Nations to advance world peace....

Read more at The Huffington Post.