Pre-Thanksgiving homework

In this Issue: a message of gratitude for your student

Because it is the month where our Thanksgiving holiday falls, November has become the Month of Gratitude for many people. Some people express gratitude at the Thanksgiving table with family, others through a gratitude journal or social media posts. I want to suggest another kind of gratitude exercise: write a letter to your Deac that you can give them at Thanksgiving; the letter’s purpose is to talk about all the reasons you are grateful for them.

Here are some prompts to help you think about such a letter. As you think about your student, what makes you most grateful about them. It could be any of the following:

• Their character
• Their values
• The way they treat other people
• The way they view the world
• Their maturity
• Their intellectual curiosity
• How they represent themselves in the world
• The love they show to family members
• The things that make them uniquely the: whether that is sense of humor, sense of style, hobbies/interests, etc.

You will note that I didn’t say anything about grades or achievements in the list above. Students tend to be perennially worried that if they are not getting all As and earning every leadership position possible, their parents and loved ones will be disappointed in them.

So as you think about writing a letter to your student about all the reasons they make your grateful or proud, go light on things they achieve, and go heavy on who they are as a human being. It may help more than you know to get a letter from you talking about what you love about their essential spirit, not that you are proud of them for grades, etc. (even though I know you are!)