What my refugee student taught me about the power of gratitude

I love telling my students about Cabdul, an undergraduate student at Grand Valley University. When I first met Cabdul as a high school freshman, he was remarkably quiet. I quickly learned why: Cabdul lacked the ability to write or speak anything more than the simplest sentence in English.

I learned that Cabdul and his family were Somalian refugees; years before, they had fled the Somalian conflict when it began to threaten their neighborhood. They traded a life of middle class comfort in Somalia for safe passage on a ship to Turkey. Over the next few years, Cabdul would lose a sister, spend three years in Turkey, and, after having finally received refugee status from the United Nations, he would end up in Michigan. When I met Cabdul, he had been in the US for just a year, and during that year he’d been in another district where he was shoved into an over-crowded ESL program. The program did have some fellow Somalian refugees in it, however, which lent comfort for Cabdul and his siblings while restricting immersion in English. As a result, Cabdul, as a freshman in high school, was by far the lowest reader and writer in his entire grade.

And yet, four years later, Cabdul graduated in the Top Ten of his class. The reason, from my observational and teacher perspective, was obvious: Cabdul had incredibly well-developed character strengths, things like grit and self-control. Cabdul studied every day for as many hours as he spent in school — this included snow days and weekends, and it didn’t stop during the summers. He asked his teachers dozens of questions per day, and he took advantage of any teacher’s offer for after-school tutoring. Basically, there wasn’t anything Cabdul didn’t do to be successful.

At his graduation open house, I asked Cabdul what motivated him to work so hard, and he essentially answered that it was gratitude. He was grateful for the many teachers who gave him extra help; he was grateful for the sacrifices his parents had made to get him to safety; he was determined to show his gratitude by being successful. Today, Cadbul is in college.

When I share the above excerpt with my ninth-grade students, I ask them to complete the following exercise:

Cabdul had a lot to be proud of when he graduated from high school, and much of it is because he kept in mind all he had to be grateful for. Write a letter to yourself, which I’ll return to you in one month, about the things you want to remember to be grateful for. You may literally start the letter with “Dear Me One Month from Today.”

I have no empirical evidence to support the power of this simple exercise, but I am confident in the motivational nature of gratitude and in the ability of small, short activities (like this one from Adriana Miu and David Yeager) to promote the long-term flourishing of our kids.

Dave Stuart Jr. is a high school teacher who writes about character, literacy, and the inner work of teaching at DaveStuartJr.com, where his free newsletter is read by over 10,000 people each week.

A longer version of this article appears here.