I got a fascinating email last night from a friend whose elder child has just finished her first year at a fancy boarding school. Because I went to a fancy boarding school, and have one child attending one, he turned to me as an authority. (Extra background: he lives and works in a small town in the South, where his other child attends public school.) He writes:
Do you have any insights on the gift giving atmosphere of boarding schools? Where we live, about a third to half of parents give a gift (like $10 Starbucks card) to K-6 teachers, and after that in 7-12 that is only in special circumstances.
A—— has been fortunate to have a very involved advisor (whom she will have the rest of her time at [the school]), along with a teacher who has her primary dorm parent, taught two of her classes and coached her spring sport. We are curious about expectations of a gift, thank-you card, etc., or them and her other teachers. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
I admit that, despite my being all-knowing, this one flummoxed me. Not only did my parents not give money to my high school teachers, I am pretty sure they did not give year-end tips to my elementary school teachers either. I wondered: Is this new—or were we the outliers? Is it regional (New England vs. the South?)? And is it right?
My first move was to crowd-source this question to the High Council of Friends and Relatives, all of them fellow parents of school-age children. Some of the answers:
“Maybe you give holiday/end of year gifts up to when your kid stops having one teacher most of the day, where the teachers become less like sitters/parents and more like specialists. Haven’t fully thought this through, but . . . but can’t imagine high school teachers anywhere are getting lots of coin. Though wouldn’t be surprised if it’s pretty common in wealthy suburbs and private day schools where the parents thinks a fat check is a sort of grade bribe.”
“The end of year gift is foreign concept to me. Holiday gift is okay—but must be nominal, like cookies that you made wrapped in a bow.”
“The end of year gift is foreign concept to me. Holiday gift is okay—but must be nominal, like cookies that you made wrapped in a bow.”
“We have given to home room teachers—but this doesn’t apply to boarding (unless there is a dorm parent situation). Nothing grandiose. Not to every teacher. Gift card or gift based on knowing the teacher, not cash.”
“We give to elementary school teachers. It’s the norm at the kids’ school, and there is a whole structure around it (school got into trouble a few years ago for not doing it in a way that made it appear as income). Nothing once the kids go to middle school though.”
It should be noted that the last reply, the one person who said, “Yeah, this is normal, we do it,” comes from another Southern town where teachers are—as in much of the South—extremely underpaid. I mean, teachers are underpaid everywhere, but it’s all relative. Where I live, in New Haven, by 2026 the highest-paid public-school teachers will make over $97,000, which I still think is underpaid, but isn’t terrible. (Most New Haven teachers make less, of course.) Teachers in suburbs near me often make more, sometimes much more.
Which means, in a city like New Haven, that the average public school parent makes less, for sure, than the average teacher; the teachers are much more middle-class than our parent population. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t get gifts, but it’s a factor to consider. It would be the poor giving gifts to the middle class. In my respondent’s Southern town, it’s the opposite: the parent community makes more money, on average, than the teachers. So a tip makes more sense.
At boarding schools, many of the teachers have family money—I had multiple teachers at Loomis with houses on the Cape or the Vineyard—and even those that don’t are paid in prestige as well as money. I think they would feel demeaned to be given cash gifts. I also think that there would be some comedy around the amounts: when a few of your students have billionaire (or hundred-million-aire) parents, how much should they give you? Twenty bucks? Fifty?
A few years ago, when I was on Facebook, I was part of a big conversation about holiday bonuses for letter carriers. I think I was pro-, because it’s something my parents did, and I figure it’s just done, and also because I like our mailman a lot (Dennis is the best), and, although I am not sure I had articulated this to myself, because I figure you get better service if you give a holiday gift. I also tend to give a Christmas bonus to the person who delivers our newspaper in the morning (and that’s a sad story: there are no more paper boys or girls, just adults who drive down the street in a car and throw a paper at every tenth or twentieth house, since almost nobody gets a morning paper, and so you never meet them, and when it’s Christmas time they slip a holiday card in the paper with their mailing address, hinting that you should send them a check—and can you blame them? They need the money. But there is no relationship, as opposed to when I was a paper boy, when I went to my customers’ doors every day, and once a week, Friday, knocked on the door and said, “Collecting!”—at which point I got my $1.50 per family, plus whatever tip they gave. If they gave two bucks and said, “Keep the change,” I was on cloud nine for the whole weekend. No money every meant more to me than that extra fifty cents).
Obviously, the sense of warmth, of fellow feeling, is part of what drives holiday gifts (tips for doormen, etc.). At least for the tipper. For the tipped, the relationship must often seem unequal and, at times, exploitative. The giver feels like cookies are for family, when in fact the recipient of the cookies might want cash.
It’s all very confusing.
What’s particularly troubling about the cash gift to teachers is that it clearly stands in for the pay they are not getting. I have to think that in societies where teachers are better compensated, with money or respect or both, there is less culture of parents giving them money. We don’t give year-end envelopes of cash to people in highly esteemed professions. We don’t tip out our cardiologist or lawyer—though if we’re frequent flyers in their offices, we might bring something to the nurse or receptionist, which tells you all you need to know.
Final thought: I remember someone telling me that in her European homeland, parents were simply much less involved in the schools, didn’t know the teachers that well, etc. Over there, teachers are professionals, they are educators, and they should be left to do their work the way that architects and doctors are—they should welcome feedback, but it should be under professional conditions, at the right time and place. No civilians in the operating room. Whereas in the United States, the ideal is that schools be porous, parents should be welcome any time, and a good school is one where parents are hyper-involved. I tend to think the year-end-teacher-gift is a product of that distorted, peculiarly American relationship to our children’s schools. The schools are underfunded, so they need activist PTOs. High parent involvement correlates with high test scores, because the same middle class parents who can make time to be involved in the school also have the money and advantages to raise high-scoring children. And teachers aren’t really seen as professionals, particularly below high school, so we might tip them some cash, the way we do a babysitter or the domestic help.
All of it is a substitute for a proper relationship to educators, which is respect and a bit of deference to their professionalism—and good pay.
Thoughts? As ever, I am at markoppenheimer@substack.com.
What I’ve been reading . . .
Recently I’ve finished Hope, by Andrew Ridker, which is super good. It’s not out yet, so I am probably violating some professional embargo, and the thugs from Viking publishers will be at my door tomorrow morning to box me about the ears with first editions of Mordecai Richler or used copies of Gail Sheehy’s Passages, but I had to say it. The author it most puts me in mind of us Meg Wolitzer—it’s a big book, big drama, messed-up family—but I also think of the satire of Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus. Let’s just say it skewers the tote-bag, NPR Jews of Brookline, Mass., the free Birthright trips to Israel for college students, and lab culture of medical research. And what a book jacket!
I paid retail for Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure, which delivers some painful and hilarious truths about why writers always feel inadequate. I will have more to say about it in a future post. If you have ever failed in a creative endeavor, which is to say if you are an artist of any kind, this is a book for you.
And I am almost done with Matthew B. Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head. This came out a few years ago, and I don’t know how I missed it. To sum up its argument: The Enlightenment of John Locke convinced us that external authority, like that of kings and priests, was bogus, and thus we should look inwards for truths and reliable perceptions; but in modernity, we have taken that insight—look inward—and gone too far, rejecting external sources of authority, like habits, traditions, artistic canons, and guilds, that actually train us to be better individuals. In our quest to be pure individuals, we have rejected the best wisdom of the ages, and thus handicapped ourselves as individuals. At least I think I have that right. Crawford is way smarter than I am, and there are difficult passages here. But there are also hilarious passages, and mostly it’s a real page-turner; the chapter on how the gambling industry captured our souls is one of the best twenty pages I’ve read in a while. Main takeaway: slot machines are sad.