As Thanksgiving approaches, I hope each of you have much to be grateful for – families and friends, the chance to be back in school, the resumption of activities that were canceled during the pandemic, and, best of all, the chance to celebrate the holiday with people you were unable to be with a year ago. These are just a few of the many things you have to be grateful for, and the list is both endless and unique to each of you, so I will not add any more to it. Many of you are certainly grateful, as well you should be, for your school, especially if you like where you are and have good teachers and friends. You might even be grateful for what you are learning, particularly in subjects you enjoy and/or perform well in. No matter how you feel about your school or your classes, it can be hard to remember to be grateful, especially for classes and/or teachers you don’t particularly like. If you try to remember, especially in the most challenging of situations, to be grateful for the opportunity to learn, you might be pleasantly surprised to see it pay off, not just with an improvement in your outlook, but with increased success as well.
Even though it might be easier to be grateful for classes and/or teachers you like, that gratitude is easy to lose sight of when you are busy. It can become only too easy to take less challenging work and/or more accommodating teachers for granted, but that is the last thing you should do. Even when you think work is easy, or when it involves information you’ve learned before, you should still put effort into it. Take the opportunity to use your study skills, go the extra mile if you are offered the chance to do more challenging work, and when these teachers say or do something that reminds you why you like them, don’t forget to thank them for it!
Obviously, it is much more difficult to be grateful for classes and/or teachers you dislike, but as you work to develop your study skills, it is important to remember that you should strive to improve both your outlook about and appreciation for your studies, not selectively, but across the board. This does not mean you should suddenly force yourself to like every class and/or every teacher. Rather, it means that you should do the best you can with whatever work is placed before you, and remember to give each and every one of your teachers the respect they deserve. Even if you don’t see the value of the work you must complete in classes you dislike, find particularly challenging, and/or find incompatible with your learning challenges and/or style, making a good faith effort and asking for help when you need it will show both your teachers and your parents that you are grateful for the opportunity to learn, regardless of the situation you find yourself in. As I have stated in a previous post about teacher appreciation, you don’t have to thank them for every little thing they do for you, but thanking them when they go out of their way to help you can go a long way toward showing them that they have your respect.
Being grateful for the opportunity to learn is about a lot more than simply striving to improve your study skills across all your classes and showing respect and appreciation for all your teachers regardless of how you feel about them personally or about the subjects they teach. Think about what you have learned from anyone and in any situation where you have been or are being taught, and whether or not you have given your best effort and/or shown your appreciation for any help you have received. Thanking a family member, friend, tutor, coach, activity director or teacher, or anyone else who has given you the opportunity to expand your horizons in any way will be well received, not only at this time of the year, but whenever you feel the time is right to show your gratitude. Just as you should not necessarily thank teachers constantly for every little thing they do, but instead find the right times, opportunities, reasons, and/or ways to express your gratitude to them, so too with anyone who teaches and/or helps you outside of school: express your gratitude thoughtfully and sincerely, and try to make it meaningful. The more able you are to do that outside of school, the more able you will be to do it in school, and the more able you are to sincerely and naturally express gratitude for every opportunity to learn you are given, the more able you will also be to apply what you’ve learned throughout your life.
Though it may seem far from obvious at first glance, being grateful for the opportunity to learn is a very important study skill. The more grateful you are for the opportunities you are given and the people who provide them, the more able you will be to put effort into what you do, and the more effort you put into what you do, the more you will get out of it in return. Being grateful for the opportunity to learn, regardless of how you feel about individual classes or teachers, as well as extending that gratitude to every learning opportunity you have outside of school, is not only a great way to improve your study skills – it is also a great way to improve your outlook on life.