Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!

Today kicks off that designated week each year when those who are or were students work together to show their appreciation for the teachers that shaped them.

No matter your age, we bet you can think of at least one teacher you had along the way who meant something special to you.

Need some ideas for how to thank the special teacher in your life? PTA.org has some great suggestions.

What to go above and beyond? How about a shout-out from the KOMO Communities team? Email us with a sentence or two about what makes your teacher so special, and where they teach (feel free to include a photo if you like), and we'll post your answers all week long.

We'll kick things off: I'm reminded of Stadium High School's French teacher every time I check my bank account or student loan balance. Nearly a decade later, and Mr. Kasner is still the answer to all of my "favorite teacher" security questions.

Teachers at the Lincoln Center are working hard to make magic happen for Tacoma's poorest high school students.

Seventy-nine percent of students at Tacoma's Lincoln High School are on free and reduced lunch - a marker often used to denote the poverty line in the U.S. In spite of this, the 66 seniors in the special extended-day program Lincoln Center have already won more than $750,000 in scholarship money for college.

"We work at the highest poverty [high] school in Pierce County, and we push them to take really rigorous courses," says U.S. history teacher Nathan Gibbs-Bowling. He says his students have the same abilities as students in other Tacoma schools, they just need more support.

That's why he, and fellow teachers at Lincoln Center are spending their extracurricular hours raising money to help their hard-working students pay for Advanced Placement exams - tests that follow rigorous, college-level courses and that can help students earn college credits in high school.

Outsiders may say what they will about Tacoma, but after last weekend there's no doubting that we know our robotics.

Thirty-five Bellarmine Preparatory School students blew the competition out of the water at last weekend's regional FIRST Robotics Competition in Portland, Ore., qualifying the team for next month's FIRST World Championships in Saint Louis.

FIRST Robotics Competition is an annual competition that pits high school students against each other in a sports-like competition in the field of science and technology.

This year's challenge, Rebound RumbleSM, was to build a robot that could play a modified game of basketball.

The Bellarmine Preparatory School team, Team 360 - The Revolution, spent six weeks after school and on weekends preparing their presentation and preparing and testing a robot: Rainmaker 13.