I opened my email and saw this subject line:
"Dear Miss Christine...." I'm thinking oh gawd what did I do now that somebody didnt like? Then I open the email and this is what it said:
Miss Christine,
I know some of us may never be amazing dancers or even pursue dance as a career but I received this chain letter and immediately thought of you.

One day a teacher asked her students to list the names of the other students in the room on two sheets of paper, leaving a space between each name. Then she told them to think of the nicest thing they could say about each of their classmates and write it down. It took the remainder of the class period to finish their assignment, and as the students left the room, each one handed in the papers.

That Saturday, the teacher wrote down the name of each student on a separate sheet of paper, and listed what everyone else had said about that individual. On Monday she gave each student his or her list. Before long, the entire class was smiling. 'Really?' she heard whispered. 'I never knew that I meant anything to anyone!' and, 'I didn't know others liked me so much,' were most of the comments.

No one ever mentioned those papers in class again.. She never knew if they discussed them after class or with their parents, but it didn't matter. The exercise had accomplished its purpose. The students were happy with themselves and one another. That group of students moved on.

Several years later, one of the students was killed in Vietnam and his teacher attended the funeral of that special student. She had never seen a serviceman in a military coffin before. He looked so handsome, so mature. The church was packed with his friends. One by one those who loved him took a last walk by the coffin. The teacher was the last one to bless the coffin.As she stood there, one of the soldiers who acted as pallbearer came up to her. 'Were you Mark's math teacher?' he asked. She nodded: 'yes.' Then he said: 'Mark talked about you a lot.'

After the funeral, most of Mark's former classmates went together to a luncheon. Mark's mother and father were there, obviously waiting to speak with his teacher.

'We want to show you something,' his father said, taking a wallet out of his pocket 'They found this on Mark when he was killed. We thought you might recognize it.'

Opening the billfold, he carefully removed two worn pieces of notebook paper that had obviously been taped, folded and refolded many times.. The teacher knew without looking that the papers were the ones on which she had listed all the good things each of Mark's classmates had said about him.

'Thank you so much for doing that,' Mark's mother said. 'As you can see, Mark treasured it.'
All of Mark's former classmates started to gather around. Charlie smiled rather sheepishly and said, 'I still have my list. It's in the top drawer of my desk at home.'

Chuck's wife said, 'Chuck asked me to put his in our wedding album.'
'I have mine too,' Marilyn said. 'It's in my diary'
Then Vicki, another classmate, reached into her pocketbook, took out her wallet and showed her worn and frazzled list to the group. 'I carry this with me at all times,' Vicki said and without batting an eyelash, she continued: 'I think we all saved our lists'

That's when the teacher finally sat down and cried. She cried for Mark and for all his friends who would never see him again. The density of people in society is so thick that we forget that life will end one day. And we don't know when that one day will be. So please, tell the people you love and care for, that they are special and important. Tell them, before it is too late.

Thank for being there when so many adults in our lives weren't!

Love,
Spam

(I called her Spam as a nickname)

I heard about that many many years ago. I did the same thing for many of my students that I taught when I was going for my teaching degree and when I taught school.

It might be cool to do a dance twist on it for your classes or even comp/performance teams. They could write one thing that they feel that person is great at in dance.

I was on a team years ago that the instructor made us all do that, except we didn't have to write it down, we had to announce it in front of the rest of the team.

We were a young team (age 10-13), and there were several teams that had come together to form this team. And we did nothing but fight. The long established girls at the studio were going to bully the new girls, the long established moms were going to bully EVERYBODY, and the new girls (ME!) were working their butts off to show that they were good enough while at the same time having to defend ourselves against attacks from pretty much everybody else.

We really quickly came to a point where we either had to make it, or break it. And we had to do this list in front of everybody else.

It had a bit of a temporary effect - we made it through the rest of the competition year, but by the end, we didn't really associate with each other outside of the time we spent on stage together.