If you’re old enough, you might remember that television show from the early 1970s that featured comedy skits about couples and their relationships.

Teacher Appreciation Week has come upon us as well as the charter attempt to coopt the week into a celebration of themselves.

Wait, Grumpy Old Teacher (GOT) googled that and it seems this year charters will wait for the second week of May to celebrate themselves.

What can a GOT say? If you have to give yourself a birthday party, … how much does anyone else care?

But the moment is here when we thank our teachers for the work they do.

How do we show teachers our love?

• Ignore them until we want something from them. Then, write flowery letters of praise with an ask buried in the middle.
• Ask them about their test scores and sniff if we don’t think the scores are high enough.
• Tell them they are essential to our society as they raise the next generation until they ask for a pay raise. Who the <ahem> do they think they are?!
• Gut their pensions. We got a lousy deal from our employers, so teachers should get the same.
• Give them a raise and then tell them they have to pay for their own health insurance. Reason? See the point above.
• Call them selfish when they point out that they are really taking a pay cut.
• Give nurses and teachers the same week for appreciation because, you know, women’s work. We don’t want to spare an extra week to give both an exclusive spotlight to celebrate them and what they do for us.
• Dismiss them when they take on the greatest challenges and the test scores remain low. Tell them the teacher is the most important factor in student success when the truth is that the teacher is the most important factor in the school building (even that is debatable, GOT would argue for the principal) to send them on guilt trips for not being superheroes or even ordinary heroes because outside factors have much more influence in how well children learn.
• Tell them they are ‘preaching to the choir’ when you are running for president and they explain how unnecessary and destructive standardized testing is. Then, upon being elected, support the failed reforms of the last 20 years. GOT will spare you a long explanation. From here on out, he will simply use the phrase, Joe Biden.
• Push for 3-year-olds to start formal learning and begin reading because Joe Biden.
• Aver that K-12 education is not working anymore, be oblivious to how insulting that is to America’s teachers of the last two generations, not to mention those generations who turned out fine and are achieving success in life, because Joe Biden.
• Open charter schools and voucher private schools because a flood of cheap, unqualified labor that suppressed wages worked so well in preserving manufacturing in America.
• Give them cheap trinkets like coffee mugs or t-shirts (gotta keep it under 10 or 15 dollars; districts have rules about gifts) rather than the respect they deserve for their professional education, experience, and expertise.
• Attack their unions not realizing that teachers are the union. Attack the union and you attack teachers.
• Block them from the dialogue about what good teaching looks like and how learning takes place. Discard child development knowledge acquired over the last 100 years in favor of a tabula rasa approach. The human mind learns by downloading knowledge from any source by any means.

The list has come full circle. Let’s celebrate teachers!

Hmmm, in looking over the list, it seems that teacher appreciation (cough, cough, we really need a sarcasm emoji) is unending.