4 novelty gift ideas to give to your friend who's a teacher

Did you know that a teacher in the UK works an average of 60 hours a week running around children and adolescents while also educating them? 60% of them are under the age of 40, whilst 31% are aged 30 and younger. These numbers contribute to a young academic workforce and may also reflect in your pool of teacher friends or they may even be your child’s teacher.

* Collaborative post

Despite the fact that teachers in the United Kingdom are among the highest paid in the world, they are still not millionaires (unless someone’s YouTube teaching channel becomes an overnight sensation!). Therefore, you know you must get creatively novel when any of your teacher friends or childs teacher have a reason to celebrate. Here is how you can surprise them with four different gifts bordering on novelty:

1. PERSONALISED MUG FILLED WITH GOODIES  

The best thing about gifting a personalised mug is that you can customise as many of them as you want to compliment as many teachers as you want. For example, if they are a maths teacher, he/she may love a caption that reads: There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don’t”

Therefore, irrespective of their teaching specialities Quality Custom Mugs from Mugtopia have you covered. Also, when buying a special someone a personalised mug you have the chance to fill it with chocolates, coffee coupons or even a bundle of lollipops for that added touch of consideration.

2. Teacher Misery

When many of your friends will be gifting summer baskets and candles to your teacher friend who just got promoted, you’ll want to find something different so you stand out, and I think a perfect gift would be a good book!

You may ask what is so novel about a book. First and foremost, its name sets the stage. Teacher Misery: Helicopter Parents, Special Snowflakes and Other Bullshit are penned by Jane Morris and remarkably put in a nutshell the satirical misery that the teaching profession has become.

Morris’ eccentric, funny and sometimes incredible teaching experiences are narrated through an assemblage of short stories, artefacts and essays. It also includes real emails from parents, administrators and students. From emails from parents who blame their kid’s act of arson on the teacher for damaging his low self-esteem to the student who proposes to educate the teacher on how to grow marijuana to pay her bills, and you cant forget the ones from the administrator who believes in treating kids like a pile of sack.

The books are funny yet insightful and are an essential read for teachers. Teacher Misery paints a humorous and entertaining picture of our education system, without deviating from the central theme about what teachers face today is complete insanity. If your friend has a great sense of humour, this would definitely be the perfect gift to get a great chuckle out of them!

3. Custom Pencil Set

A pencil is the heart of a teacher’s stationery and even those lean, lithe wooden sticks offer enough room for creativity in about 25 to 30 characters. Today, the advancement of laser engraving has made lots of inanimate objects come alive with personal text or slogans from contemporary culture on pencils, from Mean Girls (is butter a carb?) to Game of Thrones (valarmorghulis). You could go simple by only inscribing their name or clever with a selection of teacher-isms such as;

• ‘See me in my office.’
• ‘I dismiss you, not the bell.”
• ‘Don’t pass notes in class.’

You can also choose the type of pencil you want to personalise by observing the kind your friend uses or you can select either one of the following two popular types:

• Graphite pencils are standard pencils with a core of graphite and clay, and a wood casing. They are offered in multiple levels of darkness, which is achieved by blending different ratios of clay and graphite.
• Coloured pencils or pencil crayons as they are called are pencils with cores made of wax that have pigments melded in them with binding agents and additives. They are used more in fine arts, but can typically be used by any educator teaching almost any subject.

4. A TEACHER’S CADDY

A teacher’s caddy is not a novelty, but personalising it with the best personality traits of your friend, inside jokes or anything that only both of you share would make this otherwise wooden caddy a living emblem of your friendship.

A cursory online search would reveal many carry-all teachers caddies. You need to look for merchants who also offer personalisation before checking out the product to avoid unnecessary wastage of time. A sturdy caddy would be having a pocket for about everything from pencils to markers to scissors and glue, and an interior spacious enough for iPads, books, planners and more.

Apart from school, your friend can carry the caddy anywhere with his/her essential teaching supplies readily accessible and organised.