Denise Van Deroef has 37 yearbooks—one for every year that she taught high school art in New Jersey—while Connecticut’s Karen DiMenna has 38 to match her years as a middle and high school math teacher. And the funny or appreciative “teacher mugs,” gifted by students and parents?
At one point, retired Massachusetts teacher Susan Baker had more than 100—and she doesn’t even drink coffee. The keepsakes that NEA-Retired members have carried through their years include handwritten letters of appreciation, thousands of favorite children’s books, and so many sweet memories. These are just a few of the treasures that retired educators will hold onto forever.
Field hockey stick
“I taught for 35 years, and at the very beginning, I came to a school that was built in 1918 with a gymnasium about the size of a double- car garage,” says retired Iowa physical education teacher Barbara Cunningham. When voters eventually agreed to pay for a new school, Cunningham got to live the dream of every physical education teacher: She was able to buy new equipment for her girls’ programs. She chose field hockey, a sport she played in college. “It was a love of mine, so we got the sticks, got the shin guards,” she recalls.
Later, in the 1970s, when Title IX was passed and PE classes combined—boys and girls— field hockey fell by the wayside. “This beautiful hockey equipment sat in a closet.
And when I retired, I took a stick.”
Love note
Retired Florida teacher Janice Poirier and her husband have moved six times— from Virginia to Florida to Georgia and back again to Florida— and in every home, Poirier displays this sweet heart on her refrigerator door. It was a birthday gift from a little girl, an immigrant from Guatemala who mastered English in Poirier’s fourth-grade classroom. “I think of her every time I look at it,” Poirier says.
Potholders
During the Second Sudanese Civil War in the 1990s, roughly 2 million Sudanese people died, many from famine. But retired Florida teacher Marilyn Warner recalls one family who fled to Ethiopia and then somehow ended up in the town of Clearwater, on Florida’s Gulf Coast. The oldest son was a student in Warner’s first-grade class. “At Christmas, [the mother] came to my class,” recalls Warner. The woman explained, with scant English, that she didn’t have any money, but still wanted to give Warner something. The mother presented Warner with these two potholders that she had knit herself. “They always make me smile, as I remember the mother and her wonderful son, Hiruye,” Warner says.
Eraser
When Jan Jarvis Unruh started teaching in 1980 at Kansas’ Rose Hill Intermediate School, she had all the “old stuff ”—things that today’s new teachers wouldn’t recognize. She had chalkboard erasers and those five-pronged chalk holders that draw straight lines across the board. When she retired in 2005, she says, “I chose to keep a lot.” That includes letters from parents and students, and this person- alized chalkboard eraser, which was a Teacher Appreciation Week gift many decades ago.
Christmas ornaments
Like a lot of longtime educators, Lynn Alianello Diagostino has unwrapped so many gifts of Christmas ornaments that her holiday tree is a sparkling testimony to her 39 years of teaching. Some of her favorites? A felt Christmas tree sewn by a second grader; a ceramic angel, crafted by a kindergartner’s mother; a strawberry from another second grader, “one of the nicest, most polite ones,” recalls Diagostino; and a Santa with a Diet Coke can from a fifth grader.
“I always had a [soda] bottle or can on my desk,” she says, so “[the student] insisted I needed that ornament!”
The Leatherman
Bob McCarty spent 26 years as head custodian at Torrington High School, in eastern Wyoming, before retiring in August 2020. When he left, his decades-old multifunction tool—an American-made Leatherman that he bought before he started working—went with him. This pocket tool did everything from tightening a screw to opening a box. “It saved me thousands of steps,” he says.
Show quilt
Retired Ohio teacher Marti Franks was 21 when she first directed Our Town, the most perfect high school play ever; she was 62 when she directed it for the last time. In between, she and her “drama kids” took to the stage hundreds of times, producing dozens of shows for their community. On closing nights, students would present her with a gift: a handmade birdhouse for Aristophanes’ The Birds, or a hollowed-out jewelry box book for Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. When she retired in 2011, after 44 years of teaching, Franks received the most perfect present: a reading quilt, sewn from the show T-shirts given to cast and crew. “It’s the loveliest gift because it’s something you can actually use,” says Franks, who now works as a labor liaison in Northeast Ohio.
Wedding portrait
When retired Oklahoma teacher Terrie Keck was engaged to be married, two of her first-grade students drew a portrait of her and her then-fiancé, with Keck in her wedding dress and her soon-to-be husband with a big mustache. “I said, ‘Thank you, it’s beautiful!’” recalls Keck. “Both of them said, ‘That’s not all, your wedding vowels are on the back!’” The girls had written A, E, I, O, U on the other side. Keck and her husband have been married 38 years, and they still have that drawing on display in their home.
Beloved book
Not long ago, a former student found retired Washington teacher Janis Swanson on Facebook, reminding her of a book they read together in class: Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman. He told Swanson that every April 1, he plays the same joke as Catherine, the main character, who comes up with various plots to escape her medieval suitors.
“The funny thing is, I honestly don’t remember the joke!” says Swanson, who taught seventh-grade social studies and other subjects for 37 years. But she’ll never forget the student.
“Absolutely brilliant,” she says. “I always worried that I wasn’t offering him what he needed— because he was so bright. To hear from him was just wonderful. You never know what impact you’re making.”
