letters to my class

Dear Humans,

In first grade, my grandparents gave me a digital watch that could tell the time in any time zone in the world. If you hit a button, a little line moved across a map of the world and showed the time in whatever time zone it crossed.

It was super cool. And it taught me a lot more than just about time zones.

Tools can help us imagine worlds that we can’t currently see. Though I’d only been in two or three time zones when I was a first grader, that watch allowed me to imagine what life was like in every other one.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

My TV wouldn’t turn on last week. I resigned myself to having to buy a new one. I even went to Target and looked at some. My wife did  research and found the one she thought was the best. And I mentally prepared myself to spending a few hundred bucks.

But then I threw a Hail Mary. I took the TV off the wall, blew some dust bunnies off the back of it, and plugged it back in. Like a miracle, it turned back on.

The obvious answer isn’t always the right answer. But the obvious answer is always the one we should try first.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Learners,

If you know something really well, you have the glasses to view and understand any new knowledge under the sun. It doesn’t matter what you know well: dinosaurs, football, pop culture, cooking.

Lenses work by bending the light that flows through them and changing what we see. Knowledge works the same way. If you know something really well, everything new you encounter will enter through that lens, bending in such a way that makes sense to you.

But it isn’t easy to grind those lenses. It takes discipline and passion and a whole lot of time spent studying.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Experts,

When you go to a concert and see a professional musician play, you quickly realize how talented they are. They’re just on a whole other level. That’s what happens when you do something for a living and do it everyday.

You’ll meet people who say they could be good at something if they wanted to be. And you’ll meet people who say they’ll never be good at something because they don’t have the talent. But, if you’re lucky, you’ll meet a small percentage of people who actually are really good at something.

And the only difference between the three is that the last one does what they do every single day. Opportunity and talent don’t have much to do with it.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

When I made coffee this morning, I spent a good 30 seconds looking through my mugs for the perfect one. I have a lot of mugs, I have no idea where most of them came from, and most of them I refuse to drink from. So I have to search.

Last weekend at World Market I had a vision of buying 12 stackable, identical white mugs and cleaning out my mug cabinet(s). I thought it just might be the thing to set my life in order.

But I didn’t. Because life isn’t a plan to be carried out. Life is to be lived. And real living leaves you with cabinets full of mugs. And each day we get to choose the right one.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Learners,

We’re investigating the relationship between Earth and the sun, but because those things are so massive and so far apart from each other, we do it by observing something much simpler, smaller, and closer to home: our shadows.

And that shadow that you’ve been dragging around with you your whole life has a lot to tell us about how the solar system works. Yet you’ve probably taken it for granted or never even noticed it.

Knowledge is everywhere; everything is ripe for study. And no matter what you study, if you look closely enough, it will reveal something true and important about the bigger world.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Skywatchers,

It sure looks like the sun moves across the sky. And if you have spent a lifetime seeing the sun move across the sky and believing the earth is the center of everything, it would be pretty hard to change your mind.

Of course, we know better now. But it took many hundreds of years for everyone to convince themselves. But changing our minds teaches us a powerful lesson: what else is not the way it seems?

As scientists, we have to join our observations of the world with our knowledge of how systems work. Only then can we get the true picture of what’s going on. And it might not be what it seems.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Thinkers,

Sometimes in our teacher trainings they warn us against confusing the children. But the only way not to be confused in a world like this is to cling to some serious untruths.

So when we talk about all these different strategies for multiplying, it might be a bit confusing. Can’t we just find the “right” way to multiply? But we play around with multiplication strategies because we’re exploring the truth of numbers and operations. And that can be a confusing topic.

Confusion is the beginning of all knowledge. So we ought to court it, spend a bit of time with it, and try our best to emerge out of it. Then, go looking for some more.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

My daughter and I were reading a book about global tooth traditions, and when she found out that Dominican children throw their lost teeth on the roof so a mouse can take them, she said she thought that was weird.

I told her that she puts her tooth under her pillow and waits for a fairy to come take it away. Isn’t that just as weird? She had to agree with me.

It’s easy to think what we do is normal and what other people do is strange. But if we step back and look at how people act all across the world, we see one truth: we’re all weird in very similar ways.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

A few years ago the self-propelled cable on my lawnmower broke. I did a little bit of looking around for a new one, but decided I was happy to just have a push mower. But my resourceful dad replaced the cable with a guitar string. Surprisingly, it worked. And it’s held strong for over 3 years.

Things break. Time wears them down and they never work perfectly again (if they ever did). But things can be mended. And things can be fixed. And it’s amazing how long those fixes can last.

Someday I’ll buy a new mower, but for now I’m happy with the one that’s held together with guitar string and ingenuity.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck