Dear Pumpkin Carvers,

Today we’ll use all of our thinking skills to find ways we can know about a pumpkin. Where did the pumpkin come from? Why does it look the way it does? What other things is it like? What things is it totally unlike? Pumpkin farmers are always trying to grow the biggest pumpkin (The current world record holder is over 1800 pounds). What is it about the pumpkin that allows it to grow so big?

By posing these questions, we learn not only about pumpkins, but we learn about the world that the pumpkin is woven into. There’s nothing really all that special about the pumpkin. It’s just an orange gourd that happened to spring from the bush of life in North American a few thousand years ago. While there’s nothing universally true about the answers we get about the pumpkin, there is something universally true about the questions we ask.

How do we know about the pumpkin? What properties and information can we discover about the pumpkin that allows us to communicate its essence to other human beings? These are the questions that last, and these are the questions we use to discover everything we know about the world and our place in it.

Sincerely,

Mr. H