News and Insights
FINN Partners Celebrates Teacher Appreciation Week
May 5, 2026
To mark Teacher Appreciation Week, we are sharing some personal stories about special teachers in our lives – including a couple of our spouses! Educators do hard work every day to make the world a better place, and we are all beneficiaries in so many ways. We hope these stories will inspire you to thank a teacher in your life this week, too.
The Daily Work: A View From Home
Jacqui Lipson
Senior Strategist
Thank you for showing me daily what it takes to be a teacher. My favorite teacher is the one I married.
My husband is a teacher’s teacher. Not only in title, but in essence. He has never wanted to be anything else. Not for prestige, not for summers, not for a stepping stone — just for the work itself. The daily, demanding, deeply human work of showing up for students.
He listens to students, and he listens to parents. He listens to what’s said, and what isn’t. He understands that families come with context, history, and hopes that don’t always fit neatly into a system. He respects the role of a strong principal, adapts to constant shifts in technology and policy, and somehow keeps steady through it all.
I watch him teach through the ongoing noise around education — pivoting when needed, holding steady when it counts. And as the public debate swings the pendulum hard to extremes, he navigates it with patience and clarity, always bringing it back to the middle for his classroom and his students.
Always his students.
He has stamina I don’t fully understand and a work ethic that doesn’t waver.
And the impact? It’s real. Former students — now adults — reach out to him all the time. They tell him he changed their trajectory. That he saw them. That he listened. That he made them believe they could do more.
That’s the part people don’t always see when we talk about education at a distance: the policies, the debates, the noise. Living with him has taught me how to separate all of that from what actually matters.
What’s at stake is sitting in classrooms every day. It’s human. It’s individual. It’s profound.
I tried to be a teacher once. I couldn’t hack it. And that only deepens my respect for those who can, and do, every single day.
So this Teacher Appreciation Week, I’m celebrating the one who reminds me, constantly, what this work really is.
I love you. I’m proud of you. And I’m grateful for the lives you’ve changed — more than you’ll ever know.
Jeremy Cesarec
Partner
Thank you for helping kids meet their potential every day. My wife, a veteran public middle school ELA teacher and AVID coordinator (Advancement Via Individual Determination), is one of the best out there. I’m biased, but based on the stack of gushing thank you notes Tova receives from students and parents at the end of every school year, I can’t be too far off base.
I cringe at most absolutes. (Is everything really the hardest / easiest / fastest / slowest / most frustrating / funniest / worst it’s ever been?) Yet I’m comfortable saying that the daily demands of American classroom teachers have never been harder. We’ve collectively outsourced nearly every aspect of social responsibility to our public schools and our teachers face daily challenges far outside of what should be on their plates. Tova has endless stories that make my knees buckle that she considers just another day on the job. Whenever my palms sweat because I see an unwelcome name in my email inbox, I take a breath and remember that somewhere a teacher is trying to keep 30 kids focused on learning while one classmate is pouring a bottle of water on another’s head.
Amid a continual barrage of curveballs and crises, Tova maintains the poise, empathy, and dedication needed to prepare these tweens and teens with the academic and social-emotional skills to thrive in high school and beyond. The AVID program focuses on supporting middle achievers, immigrant students, and kids from families without college experience. Without dedicated teachers like Tova, these students would struggle to navigate a system that kids from more privileged backgrounds waltz through.
I work in education communications and immerse myself in the discourse every day. Research reports and funding proposals can feel theoretical and abstract, and having an educator spouse gives me a more realistic picture of what’s going on in classrooms. I’m tempted to claim our family dinners as a business expense since I learn so much about the field from Tova’s on-the-ground perspective.
As we recognize teachers this week, they’ll appreciate the gift cards, candles, and morning donuts from the PTA, but that only repays a small fraction of the debt we owe them. Do what you can to make teacher appreciation a year-round practice. They’ve earned all of our thanks.
The Foundation Builders
Leah Van Blaricom
Account Supervisor
Thank you for the tough lessons that transformed me. In college, my media writing professor was the toughest professor I had, but he ended up being my favorite and the one I learned the most from.
On RateMyProfessors.com, the reviews were always the same, no matter if the student gave him a 1 or a 5: He is a tough grader. However, the students who rated him a 5 realized, as I did, that the tough grading made us much stronger writers. I use the lessons I learned in his class every day.
One lesson was to banish the Oxford comma from my writing. He would drop our essays a full letter grade for each Oxford comma we used — if you used four, you would fail. I also learned to treat the AP Stylebook like a bible. We read the entire stylebook, one letter at a time. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this professor required us to read at least three news articles before every class (the whole thing, not just the headline!), which sparked my news-reading habit.
I treasure these seemingly simple lessons, as they apply directly to my career. To this day, every time I proofread a coworker’s writing and catch an Oxford comma, I think about how Dale Jenkins at Virginia Tech would give them, at most, a B.
Morgan Livingston
Vice President
Thank you for turning me into a voracious reader. In 7th grade, my English teacher, Mrs. Shepley, assigned us all a yearlong task: read 100 pages every month. Welp, I thought, as a non-reader, that sounded like a lot of pages. As a sit-in-the-front-of-the-class, raise-my-hand-at-every-question kind of student, I wanted to do the best at this assignment. At the time, English was my weakest subject, and I did not like it. Like, at all.
I went to Mrs. Shepley and expressed my concerns: It was too many pages, and I didn’t know where to start. She asked what I liked and suggested that I check out Harry Potter. And if I didn’t like it, she would make some additional recommendations.
What’s important about reading for pleasure, she taught me, is finding a book you like. And if you don’t like it, you don’t have to finish it. Maybe, she told me, I just hadn’t found a book I clicked with yet, and that I shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss reading in general.
And so began the wonderful literary journey that was Harry Potter. In two months, I read books one through six, nearly 3,000 pages and more than 10 times my required reading. My 12-year-old brain couldn’t consume them quickly enough. The joy of being immersed in a magic-filled fantasy book after book opened up the world of reading for me.
While I impatiently waited for Deathly Hallows to publish, I was afraid I would lose this newfound joy of reading. So back to Mrs. Shepley I went to express my concern. She recommended dozens of books to me – from fantasy to historical fiction, talking to me after each one, asking what I liked and helping me hone my critical analysis skills without me ever realizing I was learning. As we discussed and reflected, she encouraged me to write down what I was thinking, make connections between what I was reading and practice articulating my thoughts.
By the end of the school year, I was averaging upwards of 1,500 pages a month. Thanks to the time Mrs. Shepley took — outside of class and during lunch — to foster my passion, my love of reading did not disappear, like I feared it might.
I will be forever grateful to her for helping me find my most favorite hobby to this day. Thank you, Mrs. Shepley!
Kaitlyn Sze Tu
Intern
Thank you for the positive encouragement. One of the best teachers I’ve ever had always had good things to say about his students. That’s Mayukh Sen, my third-year journalism professor who taught me to find my voice. I was worried that I had little experience in the topic — food journalism — but he made the class engaging and much less intimidating by encouraging me and my classmates to follow our curiosity.
Class was never boring. Unlike big lectures where students get lost easily in the heaps of academic theories and curriculum, the articles Professor Sen assigned felt relatable yet eye-opening — whether it was linking the history of tofu to Chinese immigrants in the U.S. or how actress Madhur Jaffrey brought her homegrown Indian recipes to the American mainstream in the seventies. My favorite part of class was when we chatted about how the writing resonated with us and what it made us feel. The experience allowed me to form my own perspective on what it means to write well and serve an audience.
Professor Sen’s support has pushed me to persevere through setbacks and strengthened my confidence as a writer. For my final project, I wrote about Lizzie Black Kander, a Jewish American social activist who created welfare programs for women and immigrants in her Milwaukee community in the 1890s. Although I faced challenges going through century-old archives and contemplated giving up, Professor Sen’s thoughtful feedback encouraged me to stay true to my voice and my interest in the subject.
Now, as I work as an intern on an education policy team, I’ve come to appreciate his class even more. Having that positive learning environment helped me grow as a writer; it is an experience that has shaped how I lead with curiosity in my work until today.
Patricia Stapor
Account Supervisor
Thank you for sparking our curiosity. As Dr. Seuss wrote, “The more that you read, the more things you will know, the more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
Teachers are the ultimate guides, providing students with the knowledge and tools necessary to explore new opportunities and navigate the world. Thank you to the mentors who turned every page into a new destination in my own story.
Also, while many attribute this famous quote to Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, it’s actually from Dr. Seuss’s I Can Read with My Eyes Shut! This National Teacher Appreciation Week, we celebrate the educators who transform these words into reality by sparking curiosity and a lifelong love for reading.
The Perspective Shifters
Julian Vinocur
Vice President
Thank you for expanding my mindset. Twenty years ago, I sat in your anthropology class on the racial politics of education and the impact of high-stakes testing without any real sense that it would reshape how I see the world.
I remember walking in and finding the desks pulled into a really tight circle, no podium or front of the room lectures. It was disorienting and slightly terrifying in the best way. In most classrooms I had been in, the architecture told you who held the knowledge and who was there to receive it; yours said something different before you ever spoke a word. Everyone was accountable to the room, and the room belonged to all of us.
What stayed with me is not just what you taught, but how. You had us sit with the idea that schools are not neutral spaces; they reflect and reproduce the world around them.
We looked closely at the history of integration, at the quiet power of zoning and admissions policies, at how measures like testing and school quality get treated as objective when they are shaped by the same forces they are supposed to measure. You taught us to see all that and then asked us to locate ourselves inside it, to reflect on the forces that shaped us and the choices we would make as citizens.
You created a space that was rigorous, grounded in real scholarship, and open to disagreement. We had to do the thinking ourselves. The result was not a set of answers but a way of seeing that I arrived at on my own and have been building on ever since.
I have spent the last two decades in education; first organizing alongside communities fighting for the schools their children deserve, then inside New York City public schools working with the leaders and educators trying to deliver on that promise, and now at FINN Partners, where I lead communications for organizations across the full arc of education, from early childhood nonprofits to research universities to the schools and systems in between. So much of what I do every day — understanding how narratives get shaped, questioning what gets presented as settled or self-evident, making sure the right stories are heard — traces directly back to your classroom.
At a moment when these critical conversations are getting quieter in too many corners of our education system, I want you to know that the kind of teaching you do, the kind that asks students to think carefully and honestly about the systems we build and sustain, has lasting power. Twenty years later, I am still learning in your circle of desks.
Thank you, and Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!
Alix Clyburn
Vice President
Thank you for making history thrilling. When I was a teen, all adults were an embarrassment to be endured. Back then, to show enthusiasm for anything, especially school, was a hard pass. So I don’t quite know how Mr. Maxwell and Mr. Finney slipped through the barricades of cool to be legends at North Farmington High. They were openly passionate about American history; it was rumored they even spent weekends as Civil War reenactors. At sixteen, that should have been an “ew,” but we all absolutely loved them nonetheless.
They didn’t use any technology, no games or contests; we didn’t even have many slides in that class. They just sat on their desks or wandered around the room and told us stories. Each day the story picked up from the day before.
When confronted by the dynamic, lively way they shared the past, our adolescent armor melted. We all engaged completely. After all, they weren’t just reciting dates; they were spinning thrilling narratives about complicated people, using vivid details that made us feel the weight of the era — the way Ulysses Grant failed at everything until he met his moment, the terror of Sherman’s march to the sea, the conflict that tormented Robert E. Lee. If you’ve ever listened to podcasts like “Hardcore History” or “The Rest Is History,” you know the feeling. We were enthralled.
Those teachers planted a seed in my brain — an understanding that history isn’t dusty facts and figures. It’s a mirror. It’s about people just like us, and it’s relevant to us right now. Everything changes except for one thing: human nature. We still carry the same flaws and virtues as those who came before us. We can learn so much from the past, especially if we’re lucky enough to learn it from fantastic teachers like Mr. Maxwell and Mr. Finney.
Alyx Bowles
Account Executive
Thank you for helping me see the good in the world. One of the most memorable teachers I had was Mrs. Peffley, my high school environmental science teacher. She had a way of making concepts like climate change and deforestation easy to understand and she centered on how individuals play a role in these topics.
One assignment I still think about was when she gave us a paper Lorax and asked us to take photos of it alongside environmentally friendly practices we encountered in our daily lives. It really made me open my eyes and see how the world strives to be a better place. Suddenly, I was noticing reusable bags, recycling cans, wind turbines and other small efforts that all added up to something bigger.
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” –The Lorax
At the time, I thought that was just a quote from a beloved children’s story, but now I realize it was the point of that assignment. She didn’t just teach us about the environment — she wanted us to observe the world around us and understand the role we can play in protecting it. And as I write pitches related to climate change and the environment, I find myself thinking about Mrs. Peffley and that paper Lorax.
Ryan Chandler
Senior Account Executive
Thank you for caring about us. I want to thank the teachers who showed up for me because they cared, not just about the grade on my paper, but about who I was becoming.
It’s often forgotten how much time teachers spend with students, sometimes just as much as we spend at home, and how much of a role they play as role models inside and outside of the classroom.
I think of teachers like Ms. Salyers, my 11th grade psychology teacher, who made sure we were supported and capable, and that we always had someone to turn to for anything and everything. She was there before school, after school, a listening ear for what was happening in our lives — both at home and in other classrooms — and a constant advocate for who we were and who we were becoming.
So, this is for the teachers who go beyond the lesson plan — the ones who show up, who support, who guide, who nurture, and who help raise us along the way.
Because as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to understand that becoming the person you want to be takes a village, and teachers are such a meaningful part of that story.
Reach out
Our deep appreciation for educators is a 365-day thing here. Please contact us to find out how we can help your business or organization.