Thank a Teacher

If you can read this, thank a teacher.
A lot of people will fondly recall a specific teacher who made a difference in their life. Some people even track down their former teachers to say thank you, or keep in touch long after leaving school. It’s now a little easier to say thank you, thanks to a website launched this week by six students from Olin College of Engineering.
At Thank a Teacher, a simple form lets you send a note to your teacher by tapping into a database of kindergarten through 12th grade public schools. Simple write or record a message and hit send. Thank a Teacher collects the notes by school and sends them to principals of each school to be shared with their staff. It requires less warm-and-fuzzy effort than tracking down your teacher’s personal email address–but also less Google-stalking.
The students behind Thank a Teacher, all from Olin’s class of 2014, created the site to satisfy their capstone project requirement. They have diverse areas of focus, from computational physics to bioengineering. “As we were exploring various ideas for the senior capstone project, we realized that for many of us, teachers had played a very significant role in supporting us over the years,” says Thank a Teacher co-creator Sebastian Dziallas, adding, “many of the people we spoke to said that [they] wished they had gone back and thanked that one teacher–we’re simply making it a little easier for them to do so.