Some High School Kids Bought Their Teacher A Pair Of Vans In An Awesome Little Feel-Good Moment

NY Mag – After their psychology teacher, Taylor Kerby, mentioned liking one of his pupil’s red Vans sneakers on the first day of school, his class chipped in this week, bought Kerby his own pair, and presented them to him in class. A touching gift, which, of course, because it’s 2016, one of the students, Dyani Heredia, filmed and shared on Twitter where it has been retweeted over 48,000 times and counting.

“It’s just some nerdy, weird dude opening shoes, and for some reason, 40,000 people are liking this,” Kerby — who teaches at a high school in West Covina, California — told BuzzFeed about his adorable reaction. “But if it inspires teachers to be better teachers, and people to be better people, then I’m excited that it’s happening.” Heredia also said each of the 25 students in Kerby’s class contributed $2 to fund the gift.

All year long we’ve had these fight videos where high school kids are throwing hands at each other, generally being shitheads, sometimes even getting the teachers involved. So it’s nice for me to see this one adorably dorky teacher getting a little love from the kids in his high school psychology class. I mean look at this dude’s face:

That’s about as diametrically opposed to some of those videos we’ve seen as I could possibly imagine. I was talking about it with someone the other day about how gift giving this time of year can get super stressful and so much effort for what’s fundamentally an exchange of money and the person I was talking to said that may be true but it’s worth it all for when you nail a thoughtful gift and see that look on the person’s face. And this is a perfect example of it, pure glee on this dude’s face over a dorky little pair of shoes. Big fan, good job by these kids being one of the precious few who don’t seem to be gigantic assholes.