Students at South Knoxville Elementary School received a lesson in gratitude this month, courtesy of hundreds of University of Tennessee fans from across the country.

“Thank you for giving us the tickets. I went to the game Saturday. I liked it a lot,” second-grader Catherine Luster wrote in a thank you note. “On Saturday you did really, really good on the Homecoming game.”

Students from South Knoxville and nearby South Doyle Middle School trekked to Neyland Stadium in early November after a social media campaign called #EmptyNeyland encouraged ticketholders to boycott the Volunteers and pressure the school into firing coach Butch Jones, WBIR reports.

The boycott convinced hundreds of people from across the country to donate more than 300 football tickets to send students to the game in their place, and the kids spent their first day back at school penning thank you notes to each one of them.

“Dear UT fans, thank you for donating tickets to us,” second-grader Zachary Householder wrote. “My favorite part of the game was the dog because it was cute. The Vols scored a touchdown. It was 24-10. Vols got 24 and South Miss got 10.”

WBIR reports the young students hummed UT’s unofficial fight song, “Rocky Top,” throughout the day, sporadically singing the chorus together.

“Thank you for donating tickets to us,” Zachary’s twin brother Riley wrote. “This is my first . . . ever game and it is a game I will never forget.”

The donated tickets not only offered many students their first experience inside a college football stadium, but could also impact how the students treat others.

Robert H. Frank noted in the The Hedgehog Review, a publication of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, that there is a “large body of research by academic psychologists who have studied how the emotion of gratitude affects people’s behavior.

“The general finding is that gratitude makes people not only happier and healthier, but also more generous toward others,” he wrote.

Frank also pointed out that those who believe their good fortune is not entirely of their own making tend to be more grateful than others.

“Subjects who’d been asked to recall a good event and come up with external causes—many of whom mentioned luck explicitly, or cited factors like supportive spouses, thoughtful teachers, and financial aid—gave more than 25 percent larger donations than those who’d been asked to offer internal causes to explain the good event,” Frank wrote.

The Jubilee Centre offers lessons educators can use to build a similar sense of gratitude in their classrooms.

One lesson, “Build Your Own Virtue: Gratitude,” helps students “to think through what, when and how to practice the virtue of gratitude.”