A St. Paul teacher asked her students to design their own hats. Then she had her family knit them

Samantha Monson's students didn't know they'd be kicking off 2024 with their own custom-knit hats. But the Battle Creek Middle School teacher had seven colorful beanies ready for the boys in her special education class when they returned from winter break.

"We try our hardest to make school fun," Monson said. "We want to get them to want to be here."

In the days leading up to vacation, she asked the teens and tweens — the class is a mix of sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders — to design their own beanies on paper. She supplied them with an outline, and they did the rest. There was just one rule: The boys couldn't draw patterns on the paper, only stripes of solid colors.

The gesture was inspired by a viral TikTok video that garnered more than 40 million views by late December. Monson isn't much of a knitter, so she recruited her mother and sister to help. All told, it took Debbie and Emma Monson more than 20 hours to knit a hat for each of Samantha's students.

"It was classic Samantha in that she saw the video and said she wanted to do it for her class," Debbie Monson said. "And, crucially, she couldn't knit."

Not that it mattered to any of the students. The boys were ecstatic when Samantha Monson returned from break with fully realized re-creations of their work. They thought she was just going to cut out the designs and decorate the classroom with them.

Elija Frimpong wears his hat practically everywhere. He recently donned it on a family outing to the Mall of America.

Raheim Messenger regularly wears his hat to school. He's the artist-in-residence of the class. His drawings of video game characters and superheroes are plastered all around the room — and decorated his beanie with nearly every color of the rainbow. Like his classmates, Raheim was taken aback when he saw his design had come to life.

"It was, like, paper one minute, then it was knitted," Raheim said.

He and his classmates wrote thank you notes to Debbie and Emma shortly after Samantha Monson delivered the hats. One boy illustrated his note with a few flowers and scribbled, "Happy new year!" Another note said "You're the best!" and "Love it."

Raheim drew a self-portrait. His cartoon self stands proudly, hands on hips and chest thrust forward as he smiles with a big "Thank you!" printed above him.

Debbie and Emma visited the classroom Friday to meet the boys. Debbie Monson surveyed the room before she sat next to Raheim, who wore his beanie to class.

"You are an excellent artist," she told him.

The hats were so well-received that Debbie helped make another 29 for the fifth-graders Emma teaches. They expected the kids to express gratitude. But Debbie and Emma were taken aback by just how intensely the students clung to the fabric and thanked them for the gifts.

"It was amazing to see what a hat could do," Debbie said.

She and her daughters plan to make the hat-knitting a yearly tradition. The three educators — Debbie taught at Harding High School in St. Paul and is now a professor at the University of St. Thomas — know how such gestures leave a lasting impression on their students. It's why Debbie got into the profession.

"I just think my teachers made a big impact on me," she said.