Thank you teachers!: The astronomical demands on all teachers - The 11th Hour - MSNBC
Now more than ever we send our support and gratitude to educators everywhere. Happy National Teacher Appreciation Day. - Aired on 05/02/2023.
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made an impact.
My grandmother was as teacher as well, got her first job in a one room schoolhouse and some of her students were older than she was. And, so many decades later, I can remember going with her when she met up with two of them. They still remembered. Thank you for making a difference. 
I got ready for my wedding in. I can't imagine having kids older than me. That would have been hard! Did you ever read the "Little House” or ”Anne of Green Gables” books? They both dealt with teaching during part of those series. 
Then I saw the CBC production of "Anne of Green Gables" on TV, so I read the books after that.
And my grandmother went to Normal School, too. She said that back then, for girls, it was pretty much a choice of being a teacher or a nurse, so it wasn't a hard choice. She said if she was going to school now, she'd be an environmentalist! 
She also survived the 1918 flu. She said that her teacher brought her lessons to her at home and she did them in front of the fireplace.
And when we visited where she grew up, a fairly rural area of New York State, Revolutionary War battles were fought near here, she told me a story about her students. There are a lot of farms in the area and poorer families would hire out their sons to work on these farms. And to graduate you had to take an exam, get a Regents diploma, and she knew it was important to her students' future. There were these two brothers who worked on farms and it was harvest season, but they needed time off to take the exam. So she spoke to the two farmers and one cared enough about his worker and let him have the day off, but the other refused. All these years later, she got choked up about it, I don't remember the boys' names, but she did. 
Her funeral was on September 13 and my uncle made everyone sing Happy Birthday in the church. That was a tearjerker. 
However, these days, between school shootings, Covid and angry parents who want to ban books and supervise everything that's taught, they couldn't pay teachers enough. And it's really too bad, good teachers can make a real difference.
