letters to my class

Dear Humans,

You have very little control over what people remember about you. You’ll spend hours and hours with people, and yet there’s only a few words of yours that they’ll remember. And you don’t decide what they are. They just kind of end up there, and they stay there for years.

If only we had chisels and could carve our words into people’s memories! But we don’t. Instead, people have their own chisels–or fate or chance or luck hold the chisel–and the words of ours that are carved into their minds are what end up there. And no amount of new words can erase them from the stone.

So we have to be careful with our words. Anything we say might be the words that someone remembers, so everything we say should be something that we won’t mind ending up in the stone sculptures of another’s mind.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

Clothes are weird. We wake up everyday and we’re supposed to put something on. But it’s not just that easy. Because we’re not just protecting our bodies from the elements. What we wear today has to connect to what we’ve worn in the past and what we’ll wear in the future, and those clothes have to “say” something about the person we think we are putting out into the world. And the funniest thing is that even though we look at ourselves in the mirror, we have the worst view of what we actually look like in those clothes.

Don’t ever believe people who say they “just threw something on.” Cause that’s probably the third or fourth shirt they “just threw on” this morning. Because we’re all working on the project of creating ourselves in the world. We’re not just surviving, we’re living. And it requires imagination and style and a bit of boldness.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

We’ve been working on similes and metaphors lately in writing. And the more we do, the more I’m convinced that it’s the most important thing a writer does.

Because the world is hard to describe. Heck, it’s hard to even understand at all. We don’t always have the senses or the language to say exactly what a thing is. So, instead, we compare it to a thing it’s not. And in that comparison, something magic happens. 

Because things are not all one thing. They exist in a web of connections to other things. And it is only in these connections that we can really get a sense of the truth. Our job as writers is to mine the world for those connections and offer them up to our readers.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

When I walk through my door at home I take my shoes off. I don’t always put them away on the shoe rack, but I do hide them under the couch or  coffee table so nobody trips on them. But when I walk through the school door, I never take my shoes off. I leave them on the entire day. 

One of the things we teach you at school is how to act in public–the places where you keep your shoes on all the time. The rules here are a little different. And the rules are different because the aims are different. At home, we mostly think about ourselves and our families. In public, we have to think about everybody. And so we have to learn how to act accordingly.

This is important because you’ll live much of your life in public. As workers, as consumers, as citizens. With your shoes on.

Sincerley,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

We all know that humans learn from mistakes. So we’re pretty good at giving people (such as ourselves) the space to make them. But we often expect people (including ourselves) to learn simple and immediate lessons from those mistakes. It’s like the toddler who touches the hot stove and immediately learns to never do it again. 

If only all of life’s lessons were that simple.

But they’re not. So sometimes in life we have to let others (and ourselves) make mistakes more than once. And we have to let people learn their own lessons from those mistakes. It drives us crazy when people (like ourselves) make the same mistakes over and over. But all we can do is grant them patience and the space to learn. While learning our own lessons from our mistakes and the mistakes of others.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

Some days after school all I want to do is sharpen pencils. Especially if it’s been a long day and I’m feeling a little tired. I’ll set my watch for 10 minutes, put on some music, and just sharpen away.

If I were smart, I wouldn’t spend my time doing this. I’d have a student do it or a volunteer, and more wisely use my time on more important matters.

But I’m not always smart. And being smart–using the front, top part of our brain–is just one way of being in the world. Because when I feel the resistance of the turning wheels as I hold the pencil still, as I catch the scent of fresh-cut cedar, and while I hear the grinding and whirring of the machine as it does battle against the Steely Dan on my little Bluetooth speaker, my mind wanders places my smart brain would never go.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

I like to go to the grocery store early on weekend mornings. You’d think fewer shoppers would make it faster, but it’s not because the aisles are full of shelf stockers, their carts, and mountains of cardboard boxes. And though that makes it hard to maneuver, it’s interesting to catch a glimpse of  what goes into making a grocery store run.

In life we can’t see all that goes on behind the scenes. And even on those early Sunday mornings when I’m navigating around shelf stockers, I only see a small percentage of all it takes to get food on the shelves. 

So to truly understand the world, we have to use our imaginations. I think this is why Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Knowledge describes what we can see, but the most important parts are hidden and require our imagination.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

Teachers think a lot about the full moon. We’re halfway convinced it actually does something to our students’ brain–gravity pulls them, making them oblong and imbalanced–and affects their behavior.

It’s all hokum, of course. It’s based on old tales from way back when humans thought the moon gave its own light and moonlight could turn you batty. Turn you into a lunatic.

But sometimes even if a thing has no basis in fact, thinking it can make it so. And because the full moon sets early in the western sky, if you’re a teacher who’s driving to school, you can’t help but see it, as it’s just sitting up there, staring down on you, convincing you that today is going to be one of those days. And once we start thinking that, then our fate is sealed.

And though we can’t control the phases of the moon, we can control our thoughts about them.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

I watched G.I. Joe as a kid and the cartoon always ended with a life lesson and the same line, “Now we know. And knowing is half the battle.” And I always wondered what the other half was. Was it just doing? Because when you’re a kid, doing the thing that you know you’re supposed to do seems like way less than half.

But as you grow up you learn how difficult doing actually is–especially a thing you know you’re supposed to do. I should eat right, exercise, use my time wisely, and floss, but when the time comes for doing, knowing doesn’t help me much at all.

We live in a complex world full of complex people. And even if we do get to the point where we agree on what we ought to do, we’re only halfway there. And real living is in the doing.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

The world can be a mean place sometimes. Or at least it seems that way when bad things happen. But the worst things happen after the bad things. And they happen because people let those bad things convince them that the world is a mean place and the only way to survive it is through more meanness.

But the world, despite bad things sometimes happening, isn’t a mean place. And though we’ve all experienced a little meanness, we can’t let it turn us into mean people. Because then we create a cycle of meanness and we cause more bad things to happen. 

So we have to be a little bit foolish and a little bit vulnerable. And we have to know that sometimes we’ll get burned. But when that happens we can either add ourselves as fuel to the fire of meanness, or we can step away from the flames.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt