letters to my class

Dear Humans,

If you look around my house you’d think it is a museum to my failures. In the garage there’s the circular saw that I used to make one super-rickety box that holds nothing. In the basement is the flat-tired unicycle my dad gave me that I have tried (and failed) to ride exactly one time. There’s the soldering iron that I have used to fix exactly nothing. There are the yo-yos I could never quite get to fall asleep. There are the shelves and shelves of unread books.

And yet I bought a Rubik’s cube yesterday. There’s a very good chance that it ends up in a box somewhere before I ever get even one side all the same color. But I’m going to try.

They say you should learn from your mistakes. But one thing you should never, ever learn from your mistakes is that you should stop making new ones.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Naturalists,

We were so bored during the pandemic that we drove out on the Eastern Plains. We literally drove past a place called Last Chance, CO.

There’s not much to see out there. Flat and hardly rolling plains in various shades of parched foliage. But, then all of a sudden you’ll see a stand of giant cottonwood trees, and you’ll know that you’re about to cross a stream or a creek (or what used to be a stream or creek).

It’s amazing how large the cottonwood grows under such conditions. Maybe it just looks big because everything around it so small. Any tree would look tall when it’s standing next to a corn stalk.

But I think it’s more that the cottonwood “knows” how to grow in an arid environment. It grows quickly, tall, and cheaply and dies young (for a tree). In that respect, it’s a lot like the people who came out West in the 19th century. They grabbed as many resources as they could as quickly as they could and most of them went bust before they could make it. Our history is often written best in the clues that we unknowingly leave behind.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Scientists,

My favorite word in science is “imagine.” Yesterday I was reading a book about our moon’s formation and the text said, “imagine you saw it from Earth.” Imagine you saw the large planetesimal hurtling towards Earth, growing larger and larger as it approached, until it crashed into Earth in the biggest collision you could imagine, breaking off chunks of earth that orbited in a ring before forming together to make an orbiting moon.

We like to think science is all about facts, observations, and hard data. And those things are true. But if we didn’t use that evidence to tell stories, then none of it would matter much.

Most of what we study is too large, too small, too far away, or too much a part of us to study really closely. Unless you have a magic school bus, you can’t enter the human body or travel back to the time of dinosaurs. So instead we gather evidence and put it together to tell a story of how things got to be the way they are.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

My wife planted one squash plant in our garden and now there are yellow squash on every surface of our kitchen. They are everywhere. And I’m having trouble figuring out what do with them. So far I’ve sauteed, pureed, and roasted. Today I’ll try turning it into bread. And then I’m just going to start leaving it on my neighbors’ doorsteps.

We often think the biggest problem in life is when we don’t have enough. And that’s often true. We often feel like we don’t have enough time or enough money. But just as often our problem is that we have too much and we don’t know what to do with it.

Dealing with scarcity is easy (though painful): just do without. Dealing with abundance requires more creativity, and discipline, and compassion. It requires us to think about what we really need, who could use a little more, and the best way to use the abundance that we have.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

Bottle shape can tell us a lot. When it’s early on a Saturday morning and I’m reaching over the various leftovers on the top shelf of my fridge for the maple syrup, I can tell by touch when I have the amber sweet stuff rather than the ketchup because the bottles are different shapes.

So when I saw the giant container with a pour spout on top of the washing machine, I assumed it was laundry detergent. But no. It was fabric softener. And then I knew why the last few loads of laundry didn’t seem as clean.

The world knows that humans don’t always use our rational brains. We pick up many clues, we use all of our senses, and we often skip right over the big front part of our brain. Most of the time it works out okay. But sometimes we need to stop and read the label.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

We have two cats. One of them is a chonk who demands a full bowl at all times. She bites at your feet and follows you around the kitchen until you comply.

So we buy giant bags of dry cat food. But because it would get stale before even the chonk could eat it all, we pour the food from the bag into a 5-gallon bucket with airproof lid. Then, because it’s difficult to pour the food out of the 5-gallon bucket into the food dish, we keep a smaller amount of foot in a 1.5 quart, pourable plastic container. Then, finally, when the cat gets annoying enough, we put the food from the pourable container into the cat’s bowl.

It’s the same stuff. It’s all cat food. But to make the cat food usable, we go through a process of storing it and pouring it.

We do the same thing with knowledge. We have to put it in lots of different “containers” before we can truly understand it. And it’s useful to think about the process of getting knowledge from the big box that is the world into the small bottle that is our mind.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

They say cats have nine lives because their curiosity gets them into bad situations and their flexibility gets them out. Most of the time. Have you seen cats wedge themselves into the tiniest boxes and fall asleep? Have you seen a cat cross the thinnest ledge and not seem the least bit afraid? That’s because cats are flexible.

Cats are flexible with their bodies, but humans need to be flexible with our brains. If we react and change our behavior towards the world’s dangers, we’re more likely to avoid them. Terrible things can and do happen all the time. But, if we’re smart and flexible, we can lower the likelihood that they’ll happen to us.

There’s nothing we can do to guarantee that they don’t happen. There are few guarantees in life. All we can do is lower our risk. So that’s what we do.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

Congratulations on finishing the strangest school year ever! But I hope you’re prepared for a weird summer too. And who knows what it will look like when we go back to school.

People say these are unprecedented times. But people have always faced strange new realities. And throughout all of those times a few skills have always mattered–how to clearly communicate with other humans and how to solve problems.

So I hope you read a bunch of books this summer. I hope you write something or create art. I hope you solve problems in the kitchen, garage, or backyard. Because if you do that, you’ll be prepared for anything.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

I’ve made multi-course meals with all the trimmings, but because I could see the sink overflowing with dirty dishes while I ate them, they didn’t taste that good. The best home-cooked meals are those that don’t make too many dishes.

When we learn to do something, we’re not just picking up skills and knowledge. We’re learning how to carry out processes, follow procedures, and create systems for getting things done.

And how we do something is just as important as the finished product. Because while we might be able to crop the dirty dishes out of the perfect social media photo of our prepared meal, in real life if we still have to deal with them.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck