Students thank teachers with unique gifts

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PHOTO COURTESY OF AMANDA FITZPATRICK

After Amanda FitzPatrick assigned her Neptune High School students a project capturing Hurricane Sandy, Asbury Park Press covered it. One of her students gifted her the metal plate that “ran” the article, plus an old-fashioned “litho-print.”

Kelly Meehan and Sabrina Liding

From socks to movies to gift cards, the teachers of CHS have received a wide variety of gifts throughout their years. With some being heartfelt and others being downright weird, they are all especially memorable to the teachers.

World History teacher Thomas Ross talked about the boards he was gifted by his students that display his famous phrases while teaching. His most memorable gift, however, was something else.

“When I was at Biotech one of the students gave me a whole set of the Charlie Brown holiday videos… it was way over the top,” Ross said. “This was about eight years ago and the fact that I remember it shows that it’s very memorable”.

Communications Technology and Photography teacher Amanda FitzPatrick reminisced about her most memorable gift which she received after Hurricane Sandy. She was working at Neptune High School and had taken her photography students to the different places where the students had grown up. They “photographed devastation” and then held an art show at Jersey Shore University Medical Center. She recalls the Asbury Park Press ran a story on it.

“A week later, one of my students came walking in with this big piece of metal…. Then she turned it around and said her uncle is a pressman at the Asbury Park Press. She brought me the metal plate that ran the newspaper article,” she said. “It’s something that would’ve just been thrown out and she thought enough to say to her uncle like ‘Hey that means something to Mrs. FitzPatrick, can I have it?’”

Even though FitzPatrick may have not known a lot about print at the time, she acknowledges the irony since she now teaches print production.

“When she gave it to me it was just this cool thing from the Asbury Park Press and then moving forward to where I am now and understanding the reverse of the images and the metal plate for offset printing, it’s just a cool full circle,” she said.

U.S. History teacher Bill Clark has received some absurd gifts from teaching at both The Academy of Allied Health and Science and CHS.

“I’ll never forget the weird child that gave me socks… and they weren’t cool socks, they were… ugly old man socks,” Clark said. “Another student gave me these two glasses that say ‘slurp’ and ‘gulp’… I’ve had [them] for about five years now and I don’t understand why because it’s just corny little plastic glasses.”

Clark also received a black denim jacket from his fourth-period class last marking period.

“My 4th-period class [all] chipped in and gave me a denim suit jacket [that] actually fits nicely… it was definitely weird but that’s something I will remember them for,” Clark said.