BY AMANDA PARRISH MORGAN
It’s become a bit of a truism to point out that if a career has an “appreciation week” it’s a sign those employees are underpaid. After all–while I very much appreciated the anesthesiologist who administered the epidural I’d begun asking for the moment my water broke, I assumed my and others’ appreciation for him was conveyed monetarily. This week is Teacher Appreciation Week–a week I have mixed feelings about as both a parent of school-aged kids and a former high school English teacher.
On the one hand, I vividly remember the love parents put into hosting lunches and breakfasts at my first teaching job. I can remember the mother of a student in my AP Language and Composition class running the teacher raffle where I won (I never win raffles!) an awesome pair of earrings. Students had the chance to submit a brief note about a teacher who’d had a positive impact on their education and someone (I wish I knew who, now!) compiled these and delivered them to our mailboxes. I still have mine! I really did feel appreciated.
On the other hand–what would have really changed the sustainability of teaching, at least for me, was not something that even an impressive fleet of hard-working and efficient volunteer parents (or–let’s be honest, moms) could put together over the course of a single week in May. I wanted to maintain standards without fighting against the demand for inflated grades. I wanted to have enough time to meet with all the students one-on-one who wanted extra help. I wanted to refuse a clearly plagiarized assignment without assuming a lawyer was about to get involved. I wanted time to plan and think and learn and deepen my own intellectual and creative reservoirs without worrying I’d be behind on the ever-growing pile of paperwork for a revolving lineup of acronymed initiatives.
As a young teacher, I was lucky enough to spend four weeks of one summer writing. In a class of twelve other educators, I wrote, revised, discussed, and wrote some more. It was the best professional development I ever had and an important reminder that a good teacher of writing is one who is practicing the craft, putting words on the page, battling a shaky voice and fragile ego to read work-in-progress out loud or tearing up a bad draft and starting over.
That summer was more than fifteen years ago, but I think about it often. I can still remember where I sat each day, the smell of the classroom, the mannerisms of the instructor, and even the particular projects I first began drafting there.
It’s for this reason that I am thrilled to announce our K-12 educator scholarships. It’s beyond the scope of the Writers’ Workshop to make the kind of big changes I often wished for as a teacher and that I know my former colleagues who are still in the classroom need. But as a concrete means of demonstrating our appreciation for educators, we can make our workshops a little bit more accessible.
Madelin Parsley grew up in the panhandle of Nebraska. She holds an M.F.A. in fiction from Vanderbilt University, and her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares and Narrative Magazine. She’s currently working on a novel about five siblings, two small towns, and a family dynamic that is shaped and reshaped
Instructor Michael Belanger is an author and high school history teacher. His debut novel, The History of Jane Doe, was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award and received a Kirkus starred review. More recently, his writing has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Pigeon Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, and the 2025 Connecticut Literary Anthology.
