October 5 is National Teachers’ Day. It is also World Teachers’ Day, and it closes out Teachers’ Month, which started back on September 5.

Which means that around the first week of October, a message appears in every class group chat. Someone asks what we are giving Teacher. Someone else suggests chipping in. A third parent has already bought a mug.

Here is the thing about the mug. Your child’s teacher has somewhere between ten and thirty pupils. If a quarter of those families give a mug, she goes home with seven mugs, and she already had the seven from last year.

None of this means the gesture is wrong. It means the usual version of it does not land the way parents hope. There are better options, and most of them cost less.

The thing teachers actually keep

Ask a teacher what she has kept from twenty years of Teachers’ Days and the answer is almost never an object. It is a letter. A drawing. A note a parent wrote at eleven at night that said something specific.

Specific is the whole trick.

“Thank you for everything, Teacher” is kind and it is forgettable. It could have been written about anyone.

“Thank you for how you handled the first two weeks when Miggy cried every single morning. He talks about you at dinner now” is a different thing entirely. That one gets kept in a drawer.

You do not need to write much. Three sentences is plenty. Name one moment, say what it changed, and sign it.

Let your child make something, badly

A three-year-old’s drawing is not a good drawing. That is not the point.

Teachers keep children’s work because it is evidence that the child thought about them outside the classroom. A scribble with a name on it does that. A bought card signed by a parent does not.

If your child is too young to write, ask them what they want to say and write it down in their words. Spelling mistakes included. “TENK YU TICHER FOR THE BLOKS” is worth more than anything you can buy, and every teacher reading this is nodding.

If you want to give something, give something she will use up

The gifts that actually get used tend to be the boring ones.

Good markers, because the school ones dry out. Glue sticks. A decent pair of scissors. Storybooks for the class shelf. Wet wipes, which every preschool classroom burns through faster than anyone expects.

Food works too, as long as it is something she can eat that week rather than another box of chocolates that sits in the staff room until February.

A gift card is not impersonal, whatever you have been told. It is the opposite. It says you trust her to know what she needs.

Two things to be careful about

Do not go expensive. A large or costly gift puts a teacher in an awkward position, and some schools have rules about what staff may accept. If you are unsure, ask the school office first. A modest gift with a good note is never the wrong call.

Do not make it a competition. The group chat has a way of escalating. One family suggests a fund, an amount gets named, and suddenly there is a family who cannot afford it and now feels terrible. If you are organizing something, make it small, optional and quiet.

The gift that costs nothing

Tell the school.

Most schools hear from parents when something has gone wrong and almost never when something has gone right. A short message to the head teacher or the admin saying what your child’s teacher did well goes into her record. It matters at review time. It matters more than a mug.

It takes four minutes.

And on the day itself

If you drop your child off on October 5, say it out loud. Not a card handed over at the gate, just the sentence.

Teachers spend the day being thanked in general terms by tarpaulins and Facebook posts. Being thanked by a specific parent, for a specific thing, in person, is rarer than you would expect.

To our teachers

To the whole Shining Stars faculty: thank you for the mornings when nobody wanted to be there and you got them through it anyway, and for the hundred small things that never make it home in a report.

And to every teacher reading this who is not ours, on October 5 and the rest of the year: salamat po.

If you would like to meet the teachers at Shining Stars, they are here. And if you are choosing a school for next year rather than thanking one, we wrote about what makes a good preschool teacher and the five things worth asking about.