When I started teaching in FE, I foolishly made a bet with a primary teacher friend of mine that I would get more gifts at the end of the year than she did. My logic was that FE students are older, they generally have their own disposable income, and they are more likely to be mature enough to realise the help they get from their teachers.
My hubris became clear the closer we came to the end of the academic year. I had a good early showing, because my students were leaving around the middle of June. I genuinely thought I was going to pull it off – I was leading five to nothing. Then she received 27 gifts on the last day of term.
I am sucker for pop psychology – I have read The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. Having done numerous Buzzfeed quizzes on boring train journeys I know that "gift giving" is the way that I express affection, and like to receive it. However, this is not a materialistic trait. A card is a gift. A note is a gift. The crisps from a meal deal, with a post-it note on saying "You can have these, I’m on a low-fat diet and you’re clearly not!", from a student who I have now had expelled, is a gift.
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In terms of gifts, though, I have not been well blessed over the years. A shop opened across the road from the college a few years back, from which most of my presents have come. Unfortunately for me, it’s a Co-op and not a Harvey Nichols. I have had the aforementioned spare crisps, a diet coke, and six cherry bakewells, which though gratefully received were not adequate recompense for the 500 hours I had put in with this particular student, who had 17 assignments overdue when he rocked up at my office in April asking for help. They weren’t even Mr Kipling.
If, however, you consider the other types of "love language", I am the richest teacher in college. One is quality time, which my students give me in abundance, usually when they are bored and have a two-hour gap before their next lesson, and I have an admin task that is three weeks overdue. They spend quality time with me before 9am and after 5pm on a regular basis, and their favourite quality time is during my 12-minute lunch break.
Another is words of affirmation, which I do genuinely receive, again usually when I have saved their hides by having backed up the work they have just lost, or provided an iPhone charger cable, or found the £200 headphones they had left lying around a rehearsal room.
“Kirsty, you are a solid G”, “Kirsty, you really are the best teacher in this college”, “Kirsty my phone has never been so charged”. I write these in a little notebook and look back on them when a missed deadline or a disastrous class has shaken my confidence. You can’t do that with a cherry bakewell.
