letters to my class

Dear Humans,

If you step back and look at the things humans do, you might think they’re a little weird. In a few days you might put on a cape, slather fake blood on your chin, stuff pointy, plastic teeth in your mouth, ring your neighbors’ doorbells, and threaten them to give you candy. And they will hand it over with a smile on their face!

That seems pretty weird, doesn’t it?

But we’ve been doing it for so long that we think it’s normal. It’s tradition now. And our job as thinking people in the world is to ask why we do the things we do. How did things become the way they are? Not because we want to stop doing these strange things–candy’s great, after all–but to better understand how human beings make sense of this strange world we live in.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

I hate “finders keepers, losers weepers.” When I ask kids where they got something and they say, “I found it,” I remind them that that means it belongs to someone else and they should return it.

Because lost things are special. When a single Pokémon card is part of your collection, it’s just part of your collection. But once it’s lost, it becomes much more important. And you’ll drop everything to find it. And that means “finders” have the responsibility to return lost things to the “weepers”, even if it takes us extra time and effort.

“Finders keepers, losers weepers” teaches us that we can only gain things if other people lose them. But that’s not really how the world works. In truth, our best chance at gaining the things we want is when everyone else gains them as well.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Walkers,

My niece is beginning to learn to walk. She’s pulling herself up on things. She’s standing. Soon she’ll tottle. And then she’ll take a few steps. And then she’ll walk across the room. And, at a certain point, she’ll be considered a walker.

But you’re never really done learning to walk. Because after you learn to walk, you have to learn to tip-toe. Like how I’m supposed to tip-toe down the hallway when my family is still asleep. And then you have to learn to stroll, like you would arm-in-arm with a partner down a tree-lined boulevard when the weather is crisp and the leaves are crunching under your feet. And, if you’re lucky, at some point in your life you might just have to learn to strut.

And the hardest part is knowing when is the right time for the right kind of walking. The learning never stops. It just gets deeper.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

Yesterday my family went to the first of many trunk or treats we’ll attend this Halloween season. And, as always, I was amazed by the lengths people go to make their cars or trucks look festive. 

And they do it all just because they want to. We didn’t vote for a Best Trunk award and they were paid only in bags of candy. But still, there they were, spending hours in a parking lot handing out candy after spending hours and hundreds of dollars making the back of their Honda CRV look like a Tim Burton movie.

We sometimes think we need to give people prizes or competition to motivate them. But the truth is that people want to do well. And they want to do good. And if you give them the opportunity to do it, they will not disappoint you.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Writers,

Everybody has something to teach the world. We’ve all lived our lives in different places and with different people and with a different set of eyes, and that means each of us knows things that no one else knows. The world needs to learn about it. And the way we teach the world is through writing.

And nothing is too small. You don’t have to teach the world how to live a perfect life–those books tend to be boring. One of my all-time favorite books is called One Good Turn: The Natural History of the Screwdriver and Screw by Witold Rybczynski. It’s all about the screwdriver. And it’s absolutely fascinating!

So look around you and put your life and mind on the page. The world needs your expertise.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

We made posters of Earth’s atmosphere yesterday. And you were very careful to separate it up into its five layers–troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere. Because that’s what the assignment told you to do.

And you drew the lines between the atmospheric layers in thick, black marker. Because that’s what we humans like to do. We like to draw big, bold lines between things. The lines between states or countries. The lines between eras of history.

But most of these lines are actually pretty squiggly and squishy. That doesn’t mean they aren’t real: they’re based on real factors such as temperature and air density. It just means that the lines are drawn by human hands and human minds. The atmosphere didn’t decide to put itself into five layers. We studied the atmosphere and decided that was a good way to make sense of a really complex thing.

Because that’s what humans do.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

Right now, I’m waiting for some book order books. Right now, a lot of people are waiting for a lot of things. Over the past few decades, we’ve created a pretty impressive method for creating and shipping things all around the globe. It was sophisticated, efficient and cheap. And it worked pretty well.

But then something weird happened. And some things changed. And a lot of times when humans make things that work really, really efficiently and cheaply, those things aren’t very flexible. And they can get easily disrupted. That’s why I’m waiting for our books.

Luckily for us, individual human beings don’t have to be that way. Though we sometimes probably wish we were more sophisticated and efficient, it’s better to be the resilient and adaptable beings that we are. Because weird things happen. And things change.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

It’s interesting to watch the trees turn colors and drop their leaves. And though the trees together look beautiful with their autumn hues, when you look at them individually, you see that there’s a lot of variation. Some trees still have most of their leaves; some of them are nearly bare.

All of the deciduous trees will eventually drop their leaves, because they have to to survive the winter and come back in the spring. But when exactly they do it depends on a lot of factors: tree species, location, weather, wind.

Humans are kind of the same way. We’re all going through processes of change that keep us alive. But there are a lot of variables in how and when. And each individual is different. So we have to learn to be patient. Just like the trees.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Meteorologists,

We like to look down our noses at the past. We think we’re so much smarter than people used to be back then. Back when they’d put leeches on their owies and base their weather predictions on folk sayings about the color of the sky. We with our satellites and radar and high tech weather instruments.

But the heart of science has always been looking and observing, not the fancy gadgets we do it with. Sure, our forecasts are much better now, but it’s not because we’ve done something different. It’s because we’ve gotten better and more organized at that same old human impulse: to see the world, to know the world, and to share our knowledge of it.

And future generations will get even better at it. And they’ll look down their noses at us, fools that we are.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

Every once in a while I have to clean the gunk off the pump dispenser of the hand sanitizer bottle. If you don’t, it will spray in unpredictable directions and just might get you in the eye.

But while I’m cleaning off the dried over hand sanitizer, I know that the crud will return in just a few days. It’s the same way I feel as I’m mowing my lawn–it’s just going to grow back. And when I’m organizing my sock drawer–this too will soon give way to disarray.

Much of life is a losing battle. We can’t keep up with the forces against us. But when I’m starting to feel down about this fact, I look at that freshly cleaned pump dispenser, and my heart rejoices. I think about how good it feels–at least for a short while–to look out over my fresh-cut grass. 

And that’s enough.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt