Science teachers get mugs. Mugs with beakers on them, mugs that say "I teach, what's your superpower," mugs full of candy. They have a cupboard of them. The gift that lands with a teacher is the one that takes their subject seriously, because they do, and that they can wear or hang in the classroom and get asked about.
Every design at Lunthra is a real piece of science, drawn accurately enough that a teacher can use it as a diagram, with the numbers printed on it. Here is a guide by the subject they teach, and then by the format that fits how well you know them.
Earth and environmental science
- Severe: six plates, five of severe weather and one earthquake, each with its warning flag and its map symbol. The Funnel tee is a tornado under its supercell with the forecaster's glyph for it; the Eyewall is a category-five hurricane from orbit. A meteorology lesson a student can read off the front of a shirt.
- Euhedral: four minerals, four crystal habits. Pyrite cubes with their striations, fluorite on matrix, a bismuth hopper crystal, dendritic copper. Formula, crystal system and hardness on every plate.
- Confluence: the branching networks of the world's great rivers, the Amazon to the Yangtze, drawn as the tributary trees they are.
Biology
- Clade: real phylogenetic trees as radial cladograms, every taxon named around the rim. Dinosauria with the birds nested inside the theropods, the three-domain tree of life, flowering plants, fungi. The poster versions are classroom-wall sized.
- Vitrine: natural-history specimens drawn as museum plates. A trilobite in dorsal view, a nautilus cut down the middle to show its chambers, a raven skull, a stag beetle.
- Abyssal: deep-sea animals with their depths. The anglerfish and its bacterial lure, the vampire squid, a siphonophore colony, the dumbo octopus.
- Soma: human anatomy as structure, the heart's chambers, the carpal bones, the branching of the lung.
Chemistry
- Spectra: the emission lines of the elements at their true wavelengths. Every chemistry teacher has done the flame test; lithium, strontium, copper and sodium are here as the lines behind the colours. The Fraunhofer tee is the Sun's absorption spectrum.
- Valence: bonding and structure. Shell is electron shells, Lattice a crystal lattice, Phase a phase diagram.
- Threshold: phase transitions. The Water and Carbon Dioxide plates are the diagrams from the textbook, with the triple point where it belongs.
Physics and maths
- Magnitude: length, mass, time, energy and temperature laid out on logarithmic axes from the smallest known value to the largest. The orders-of-magnitude lesson, wearable.
- Chaos: the double pendulum, the Lorenz attractor, the logistic map. For the physics teacher who does the pendulum demo.
- Frond: fractals. The Barnsley fern, the Sierpinski triangle, the dragon curve.
- Singularity: general relativity for the one who teaches it, the gravity well and the Penrose diagram.
Astronomy, computing and robotics
- Orbital and Apogee: planets and the spacecraft sent to them. A ringed gas giant, a barred spiral galaxy, a 6U CubeSat with its arrays deployed, a segmented mirror.
- Cipher and Substrate: for the computer science teacher. The Enigma rotor wiring, the Diffie-Hellman exchange, a NAND gate with its truth table, the 555 timer.
- Cadre and Rotor: working humanoid robots and drone airframes, dimensioned, for the robotics club advisor.
Which format
- From one student or a family: a tee in their subject. Unisex sizes, with a measured size chart on every product page.
- From the whole class: pool for a hoodie, the one they will wear on the cold-classroom days, or a classroom-wall poster that stays up after the year ends.
- When you do not know their size: a cap or a 16 × 32 inch desk mat for the teacher's desk. Neither has a size.
- When you do not know their subject well enough: a gift card, and let them pick the plate they would teach from.
What to avoid
- The pun. "I've got my ion you." They have seen it.
- Generic science. An atom with no element, a DNA helix with no organism. Specificity is what makes it a gift for a teacher instead of a gift for a stranger.
- Anything they will have to explain is wrong. A teacher cannot wear a diagram with an error in it. Every plate here can be checked against the textbook; that is the standard.
Teacher Appreciation Week is the first full week of May, and the end of the school year follows it. The holidays come first. Whichever it is, start from the subject, browse the gift guides for more, and pick the piece that names something they taught this year.
