letters to my class

Dear Humans,

Ken Kesey has my favorite quote: “We can count how many seeds are in the apple, but not how many apples are in the seed.”

You have to believe that you’ll be more than your inputs: more than the houses you were raised in, the schools you were educated in, the cultures that surrounded you. Those things are important and instrumental, but they are not destiny.

Because there’s something special in each person. Some people call it a spark or a personality or some people even call it a soul. I call it an apple seed. But it doesn’t really matter what you call it. It’s something inside of you that can grow beyond the limits that exist outside of you.

If you let it.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

As a father, I have drawn a lot of baths. I’ve sat on the edge of the tub, tested the water, stirred, adjusted, tested, adjusted, stirred.

And there are a lot of ways to draw a bath. You can try to get the temperature perfect coming out of the spout or you can start scalding hot and cool it down or start cool and heat it up. It doesn’t really matter. All that matters is the final temperature when the bather dips their toe.

This is true for most of life: There are many ways of doing a thing. Instructions, algorithms, and recipes are nice and sometimes necessary. But usually when people talk about “the right way” of doing something, they really just mean “their way” of doing it.

You’ll know you’re really getting it when you see the whole picture well enough to come up with “your own way” of doing it.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

My wife and I organized our kitchen this weekend. We cleaned out cabinets and drawers and spice racks and pantries. And now everything has its place and everything is in its place (at least for now).

But we didn’t touch the junk drawer. Because you can’t organize the junk drawer. The junk drawer exists outside the rules of organization. It’s where you put things that don’t quite fit anywhere else. 

And yet, the junk drawer is the first place you look when you really need something. The manual for the humidifier you bought a year ago. A paper clip to reset your modem. The precision screwdriver to fix your glasses. The pumpkin carving tools you use the Saturday before Halloween. The sterling silver napkin rings for the special occasion.

Sometimes things in life don’t fit in the categories we assign. That’s where you find the good stuff.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

Sometimes when I’m writing, I’ll delete an entire section and rewrite it from scratch. I remember the things I want to say, but I just want to say it in a different way. Instead of revising it a word at a time, sometimes it’s helpful just to start over. 

But that takes a lot of faith. That you’ll remember the good stuff that you deleted. And that what you come up with next will be better than what you had before. Because the blank page is a scary thing.

And that’s true in life too. Each day is like a new draft that we start on a fresh page. A lot of what we write might be the same as the day before, but the new day presents a chance to say it in a new and better way.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

Esterdayyay we learned the basics of Pig Latin. It’s useful if you want to suss out any secrets adults are trying to keep from you while you’re in the room. It’s also just fun. Because playing around with language is always fun. 

But my daughter pointed out another advantage while we were having a Pig Latin conversation on the way to her dance class last night. “When you speak in Pig Latin,” she said, “you really have to think about your words before you say them.”

Wouldn’t it be great if we all spoke in Pig Latin just so we thought about our words before we said them? Even though we’d sound a little goofy at first, I think we’d all start talking a lot more sense.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

Yesterday I handed you a sealed black box with a marble and some foam pieces in it and asked you what it looked like inside. You couldn’t look, so you had to roll, listen, feel and imagine what it looked like.

Yesterday you solved a story problem about 800 oranges in baskets and bins. We didn’t have 800 oranges in the classroom, so you had to imagine what that many oranges would look like.

Yesterday you wrote personal essays about objects that are important to you. You knew those objects intimately and knew exactly why they were important, but you had to imagine you were in your unknown reader’s shoes and reading about it for the first time.

Most of what we do in school (and in life) is imaginary, because the important stuff is too big, too small, or too complex to know in any other way.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

I learned about the American Revolution in 3rd grade and 5th grade and 8th grade and 11th grade and as a freshman in college and then again as a senior in college. And when I was out of college I got on a kick where I read a bunch of Joseph Ellis and David McCullough books. 

You could say I’ve spent my whole life learning about the American Revolution. And I still feel like I hardly know anything.

But, because I’ve spent an entire lifetime learning how to learn about the American Revolution, I have a pretty good idea how to learn new things, connect them to old things, and use them to explain something about this complex world we live in.

So, if you ask me trivia questions about the Battle of Saratoga, I probably won’t know the answer. But I will know how to find it out.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

I’m sure you’ve heard it before–and it’s true–people are more important than things. The Marshall Fire that burned just a few miles away from us was a tragic event–two people died and nearly a thousand homes were lost. But it was also a miracle that more lives were not lost. 

And yet we know that things are important. We surround ourselves with stuff that reminds us of the people who are important to us. The objects in our homes hold memories from our past and hopes for our future. Just like great-grandfather’s matchboxes, our possessions–simple as they are–are haunted by the people and memories that make us who we are.

But they can always be replaced. Our memories can survive travel, moving, loss, and tragedy. And that’s why people have raised over $25 million to help the victims do just that.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

Yesterday we made origami boxes. And your first box might not have been very good. But your second box was a little better. And each box afterwards was a little better than the last.

No matter what job you’ll have when you get older (and you might have many) most of it will be doing the same thing over and over. And you’ll be good at your job if you are always getting better at doing that thing. You might do that thing with your hands or with words or by putting numbers in a computer. But the main job of any job is figuring out how to do it faster, better, and more efficiently.

So that’s really what we’re practicing at school. Everything we do–not just reading, writing, and arithmetic, but keeping our desks clean, having conversations with classmates, folding origami boxes–is about doing it better than we did it yesterday.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

A plant catalog came to our house the other day. It has seeds, bulbs, and plants for mail order, each with a short rundown, each with a code that tells you where and in what conditions to plant it. 

I’m not a big gardener, but I can see its appeal. Because it sure is fun to sit inside on a dark, cold winter night and think about the plants that you’ll bloom in the spring and summer. I’m sure there are many people who use that catalog to plan out what their entire yards will look like, all while those yards are currently covered in snow. They might even look out their frost-covered window and be able to perfectly see what those yards will look like in late June.

Because a whole lot of life–and maybe its best parts–happens mostly in our imagination.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt