Nowadays, It’s an Apple iPod for the Teacher
There was no such thing as a holiday teacher’s gift when I was a kid. The centerpiece of the school year was the day I invited my teacher over to my house for lunch, for which my mom hauled out the English hunt-scene china and served her signature chicken a la king and a lime-and-black-cherry jello mold. It was a public school, as natural a part of our hard-earned landscape as a weedless lawn and window screens. My parents paid taxes to send me to that school, and that, along with the annual lunch, was thanks enough.
No longer. The New Yorker just ran an article on holiday gift-giving at Los Angeles-area private schools, chockablock with examples that ran from the sublime (a certificate for a spa day) to the ridiculous (the often-Lilliputian cosmetic samples that come as a gift-with-purchase). Teachers also seem to be a prime target for re-gifting -- though if you don’t want that Kelly green sweater with the reindeer that Aunt Maude sent you, what makes you think that your child’s European history teacher will?
Calling a freebie a present, or re-gifting an ugly sweater, is an exercise in euphemism -- at worst insulting and at best kind of comic. The wacko sustenance gift, like the $100 Ralphs gift certificate, occupies another galaxy altogether: Yes, this society pays the guardians of our youth far less than it does the ad guy who seeks to separate the kids from their allowances, but teachers are adults, and they probably have figured out how to eat on their salaries.
Expensive gifts raise trickier issues. Hey, big spender: What exactly do you expect in return when you hand out iPods to the kids’ teachers? In an example of moral bankruptcy that’s right up there with insider trading, some parents seem to expect that their children’s grades will inflate.
Just as bad, they may be right: One teacher told the New Yorker about giving the occasional “courtesy upgrade” to a student who hovered, say, between a B-plus and an A-minus, in recognition of a pricey gift.
But school is not a frequent-flier program, or at least it’s not supposed to be. You’re not supposed to get perks just because you spend a little more. It seems to me that private-school families -- including mine -- already enjoy enough advantages to make most families’ heads swim, from small classes to passionate teachers to a groaning board of academic and extracurricular choices. So why do some families feel compelled to grease the wheels?
Because they can. Because here in Los Angeles it isn’t acceptable to be anything less than superlative, whether we’re talking about a child’s grades or her parents’ sagging nasolabial folds. We are all about being the best, whether that requires the ministrations of a syringe-wielding dermatologist, a deft colorist or a personal trainer. If we can defy time with a credit card, a better school transcript seems like an easy fix.
Which puts those of us who still believe in smaller gifts in an odd predicament. A friend of mine donates to a charity in her child’s teachers’ names, and they get a certificate saying that they’ve given 10 blankets to a shelter or 100 vaccines. She is no less grateful than the big givers; she just can’t underwrite excess, nor does she feel it’s right. As for me, I like giving gifts that require the investment of thought and time. I get a perverse pleasure out of the endless analytical conversations my daughter and I have over what gift will best acknowledge a specific teacher’s love for the Red Sox or passion for mystery novels.
So don’t look for special-issue U2 iPods from this family for everybody at school this year; we can’t afford it on financial and moral grounds. Will girls from spendthrift families leapfrog over our daughter to a gift- inflated courtesy GPA? I refuse to believe it.
I prefer to think that the teacher the New Yorker quoted is the cynical exception who proved the rule. And if she isn’t, one can only assume that the mischievous reverse is true -- that some teachers whose moral hackles bristle at outsized gifts are making a list, checking it twice and, having found out who’s naughty or nice, are perhaps knocking the occasional A-minus down to a B-plus. The courtesy downgrade: Now there’s a holiday concept to chill the heart of anyone who thinks they can buy happiness.
