letters to my class

Dear Humans,

All my life I’ve been told that education is the key to a better life. If I paid attention in school, worked hard, and got good grades, I would get the things I wanted. And it’s true! If you learn what you’re supposed to learn in school, you are more likely to get a better job, a bigger house, a nicer car, and a more comfortable life. 

But those things, of course, are not the point of learning. They’re nice by-products. It’s very nice to keep ourselves free from material worry or strife. But the point of learning is freedom. The point of learning is coming up with your own ideas about what the world should be like and having the means to make the world (or at least a little bit of it) a reality. 

So that’s the lesson plan for today.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

I’ve never been to Nepal. Heck, I’ve never even been to Asia. So I’ve never seen Mt. Everest and I most probably never will. And I most certainly will never climb Mt. Everest or even attempt to climb it. Heck, I’ve never even climbed a 14er.

But I still feel like Mt. Everest belongs to me. Because I remember seeing the number 29,032 at the top of the list of World’s Tallest Peaks in the World Almanac when I was in 4th grade, because I read Into Thin Air when I was in high school.

In the same way, Mt. Everest belongs to you. Not for you to climb and litter up with spent oxygen bottles, but it belongs to you in the same way that everything in the world belongs to all curious people: to know about, to think about, to fit into the unsolvable puzzle of this strange world that you belong to.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

The classroom is a special place. It’s unlike any other you’ll inhabit in your lives. It’s not the home, it’s not the workplace. It’s a learning place where you have to take risks and be vulnerable. And that’s a really scary thing to do in front of your peers. 

And you can only do that if you have each others’ backs. That means you do the things you say you’ll do and give each other the grace and space to make mistakes and learn from them.

It doesn’t mean you have to be besties. I don’t talk to very many of my old classmates. But when I do run into them, we have a whole lot to talk about because we’ve spent so much time together. And I know they’ll always have my back.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

I guess it’s going to be quite windy today. So I brought our  inflatable polar bear into the garage. I’m prepared  to lose power if the wind snaps the power lines. I’m ready to pull over to the side of the road when the visibility becomes zero because of blowing dirt and debris.

Even though meteorologists know the conditions are ripe for some crazy wind today, we can’t know exactly when or where those gusts are going to hit. We just have to be as ready for them as possible. 

I hate the wind, and I know I’m not the only one. I think we hate wind so much because it’s unpredictable. It’s something that is beyond our control. That’s true with most weather, but with snow we can shovel it and with rain we can take an umbrella. With wind, we just have to prepare and wait.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

This weekend I had to fix my sliding screen door. Again. Because it came off its track. Again. And when it’s not on its track, no matter how much you push and pull on it, it just won’t work right. You have to take the door completely off and make sure those little wheels at the bottom are correctly aligned on the track. 

And you’ll know you’ve got it when even the slightest push glides that screen door all the way back home. And it’s a very beautiful thing

In life it’s easy to get off track. And when you are, nothing seems to work right. And pushing and pulling don’t help. The only thing you can do is take the screen door off and reset it back on track correctly. 

And then you’ll have smooth gliding. At least for a while.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

Most of the time in life you won’t know the answer. You won’t know exactly how to put together the bookshelf you buy, you won’t know exactly how to do the job you somehow got hired for, you won’t know the exact right words to say when your friend is going through a crisis.

And it’s frustrating because so many people claim they have the easy answers for us, and they’re available for 3 easy payments. But we quickly find that those things don’t work as promised, and we’re a little poorer and a little more embarrassed. 

Because life is figuring stuff out. And sometimes we only find a way that works after we’ve tried seemingly every way that doesn’t. And about the time we think we start to figure something out, a new challenge arrives, as if handed down from the heavens, and we’re back to where we started.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

I remember nine years ago when it was 12/12/12. And I even remember the minute that it was 12:12:12 on the 12th day of the 12th month of the 12th year of the millennium. And at the time I thought it was a pretty big deal.

But now I’m learning that this entire week the dates have been palindromes–the same forward and backwards, such as 12-9-21. And the second day of December the date was even an ambigram–the same upside down as right side up (in digital numbers).

And while these coincidences are pretty cool, they’re not actually as rare as I once believed. And the reason is simple: humans are always taking delight in finding patterns in the world. It’s what we do. And it says a whole lot more about how our human minds work than any sort of hidden messages out there in the world.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

On Monday morning I arrange a beautiful bouquet of freshly-sharpened pencils, standing tall with their perfect points and pristine, bright pink erasers, wafting the sweet smell of cedar through the room.

And by Tuesday afternoon the cup is in all sorts of disarray: stubby pencils with dull points, erasers worn down to the ferrule, and the smell completely gone or covered up. 

But as much as I like the look of the Monday morning pencil cup, there’s something to be said for the spent potential in the Tuesday afternoon cup. Because though some of you sharpen pencils way more you need to, most of those pencil inches went towards something good: writing sentences about your life or the life you want, solving math problems that uncrack the mysteries of nature’s patterns, or recording observations that make you say “wow” in science class.

And that makes me like the Tuesday afternoon pencil cup a little more.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curtt

Dear Humans,

Our whole world is built on trust. When I stop at a red light, I have to trust that the person behind me driving that two ton hunk of metal at 45 miles per hour will also stop. When I get my Junior Bacon Cheeseburger, I have to trust that Wendy’s followed the safety procedures and washed their hands. When I hire a babysitter for my children, I have to trust that they won’t teach them too many bad words.

And it’s kind of a scary thing. Because we’re at the mercy of other people. And we can’t always be in control. 

Skepticism is good. We always want to hold people and systems accountable and try to make things better. But when it turns into cynicism, when we withhold our trust just so other people can’t ever hurt us, then we’ll find that all of our wounds are self-inflicted. And those ones hurt way, way more.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

I was pushing pizza dough into a pan this weekend, and, because my hands were covered with cooking spray, I couldn’t get the lid off the jar of pizza sauce. So I silently held the jar out to my sister-in-law who was at the counter, and, without a word, she twisted the lid off and handed it back to me.

Researchers know that most human communication happens through how we say things or body language, but very little is communicated in the actual words we say.

We might not need words to get through our day-to-day lives, but they sure do help make those lives meaningful. Words are for singing and rhyming and telling jokes and cracking open the big ideas that turn our days into lives and connect those lives to the lives of all the other humans wordlessly going about their daily existence.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt