Teacher Appreciation Week celebrated with Google Doodle

By Tonya Pendleton

Monday's Google Doodle acknowledges Teacher Appreciation Week which started as a day advocated for by Eleanor Roosevelt.


May 8 (UPI) -- Google is celebrating Teacher Appreciation Week with a Google Doodle. Instead of the usual image of a public figure, Monday's Google Doodle is a GIF that symbolizes all the work that teachers have to do.

In the animated image, a teacher is shown as a sun-like figure, both watering and shining on another figure that is an animated image of a student reading. As the water and sun come down, the animated figure 'grows.'

Teacher Appreciation Week is an extension of Teacher Appreciation Day, which was spearheaded by first lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1953. She was moved to see teachers honored because she didn't believe their contributions were given enough credit.

"I have always felt that we did not give an honorable enough place in our communities to the teachers," Roosevelt wrote on Jan. 14, 1953, the day Congress passed the resolution to set aside a day to honor teachers. "Next to parents they are the most important people in our communities. It is quite impossible to give teachers monetary compensation alone that will repay for their devotion to the job and the love that must go to each and every child. But I think we could compensate a little more adequately the teachers in our communities if we were conscious of their importance.

I have heard people say: 'Why, it is a soft job to be a teacher. They work only eight or nine months of the year. Think of having such long holidays, and they are not really working hard at any time.'

As a matter of fact, good teachers give so much of themselves every day that by the end of the week they are really tired out, and if they did not have the holidays in which to study, to travel or to relax, they could never give the children under them the inspiration that children need."

Teacher Appreciation Week is now celebrated annually giving people the chance to acknowledge and celebrate the men and women nationwide who educate young people.

"In their daily lives, the men and women who teach our children fulfill the promise of a nation that's always looking forward, that believes each generation has a responsibility to help the next in building this great country of ours and making the world a better place," Barack Obama said at the 2016 National Teacher of the Year Celebration.