WHAT TEACHERS WANT.

If you had a box filled with fourteen lime-green plastic shrimp forks and then you lost one, there are several things you could do. You could invite twelve people to dinner and serve shrimp. You could put the forks in a drawer and hope that the lost one eventually turned up. Or you could tape the box closed, wrap it in holiday paper, and give it to your child's history teacher for Christmas.

Tim Newhart, who is a teacher at Harvard-Westlake Middle School, in Bel Air, California, where I used to teach in the Upper School, was the recipient of the forks. "I held on to them for a while, out of shock," he says. "And also to remind myself how bizarre this job is."