2021 Post #13 -- Diving Into Gratitude

 by Rebekah O'Dell

During "Pandemic School" -- a term my colleague coined to encapsulate the general chaos and turmoil we are all experiencing this school year -- I have been trying to model specific, concrete gratitude for my students.

“I’m so thankful I get to see your entire faces today,” I said in our first class meeting during a sudden virtual pivot.

“I’m so glad we’re all back together again, even if it’s behind plexiglass and masks,” I said our first day back at school.

“I’m excited we get to figure out together how to make our language field guides digital this year!” I feigned.

I do this because I need it. Because, this year, gratitude is not always my first language. Because I want it to become a language students start to practice when they need help, too.

Gratitude is a fake-it-’til-you-make it sport. We become more grateful and experience the myriad mental and physical health benefits that gratitude affords not because we are always feeling it but because it’s a discipline.

And, like any discipline, we sometimes do it through gritted teeth.

One particularly bleak winter morning, I came across the poem “Winter Thanks” by Marcus Jackson.

What struck me was the specificity. Unlike some other gratitude poems, this poem isn’t sweeping in its scope. Instead, it gets highly specific about one thing the poet is grateful for in the winter: heat. Jackson drills down, stretching and pulling his thankfulness apart to examine what it’s made of.

This poem provides a great lesson on zooming in and getting specific.

Here’s how I used it with my students:

First, we read the poem, and I asked students the question I always ask students about everything we read: What do you notice?

Students immediately noticed that all of the items discussed in the poem have to do with heat, which is something you would naturally be thankful for in winter. They smartly said it’s like Jackson “zooms in” on all the things that make heat, that give him heat in the cold winter months, and he describes each one very specifically.

They noticed the formal tone that “sounds like church” and the repetition of the word “praise”.

Then, I asked students to try their own, using these instructions:

• Think of something you’re thankful for right now.
• Now, zoom in. Break that down into 8-10 smaller aspects or elements.
• Describe each of those elements in a phrase that: describes its appearance, describes its function, describes its behavior, describes its feeling, describes its sound
• Now, string them together -- adding line breaks + repeating “praise” at the beginning of each new element you describe.

Jackson’s easily-recognizable frame provides a template into which students can fit their own thinking and quickly end up with a successful poem of their own in about 10-15 minutes.

Further Reading: 

 

Rebekah O’Dell teaches middle school English in Richmond, Virginia. She is the co-founder of MovingWriters.org and the author of a number of professional books. You can find her on Twitter @RebekahODell1 and at movingwriters.org.