letters to my class

Dear Humans,

I’ve told you this before: when I was your age, I cared a whole lot about what people thought of me. And because of that, I never put myself out there.

But when I look back now, I see how much time I wasted. I could have spent that time becoming the best me I could be. Instead, I tried to be the me that I thought other people wanted.

You all are some of the coolest people I know. I hope you spend the time you have now working on yourselves. Because that’s who you’re going to spend the rest of your lives with.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

As my family was pulling into Pet Smart last night–again–to buy more crickets for the bearded dragon–again–we were ruing our decision to buy it. It’s been expensive. There have been a lot of cricket issues. And the cats really seem to want to play with him, or eat him.

But it’s really cool to watch him eat crickets. And forcing ourselves out of our comfort zone and learning something new is probably a thing we ought to do more often. And it’s definitely been that.

Most of life’s irritations–like buying crickets again–are the problems that go along with the good things in life. And so we take them as they come.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Students,

All day long I’m going to be looking forward to grading your math tests this afternoon. I’ll play some country music on my iPad, brew up another cup of coffee, put my feet up on a chair, and uncap my felt tip marker. I can’t wait.

Because my favorite thing is watching you do well. And I know that doing well is different for each one of us. But I know each of you well enough to know what you’re capable of. So when I see you reach that level (or go past it), I get really excited.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

On Sundays I like to watch the Broncos play. I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember, and I look forward to it all week.

And, yet, I’m miserable for most of the three hours I’m watching it.

I love spending time with my children, but I spend a lot of that time mediating arguments. You might enjoy playing video games but get frustrated when you have to keep trying to beat a level over and over. It’s a funny thing about life that the things we really love tend to bring us the most pain.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Tinkerers,

The first rule of tinkering is to make it work. Don’t ask for help. Don’t let someone else do it for you. Don’t give up. Just make it work. And the second rule is to just make it work better.

I used to think I always needed to run to the store or amazon.com to buy just the right things: just the right ingredients, just the right materials, just the right tools.

But now I believe we have most of what we need inside of us or around us. It’s good enough. Or, at least, we can make it work.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

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