letters to my class

Dear Doers,

Making my bed in the morning doesn’t make much difference by itself. I’m just going to pull the covers back down later that day. But I find that making my bed each morning makes it more likely that I will do other things that help me have a productive day: eat a healthy breakfast, pick up my clothes off the floor, wash the dishes in the sink.

Little things are little things, but they often lead to much bigger things. So when you come into the classroom, make sure your area is picked up, make sure you have what you need for day. Do the little things that will help you do the big things.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

There’s a lot going on around you. And you might feel pressure to try to keep up with it all: know the latest fads, watch the hottest videos, wear the best clothes.

But trying to keep up with everything going on around you is exhausting. And it doesn’t really get you anywhere. It just makes you like a hamster on the wheel–running as fast as you can but going nowhere.

Figure out what is most important to you and focus on that. If you find one thing you do well and make that the thing that you’re always going to do well, the world will have a place for you.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Historians,

Humans use whatever we can find to make meaning of the world. And we don’t just try to make meaning of our world right now; we also look into the past to figure out what the world used to be like.

And that’s where it can get tricky. Not all cultures left behind words for us to read. Instead, archaeologists have looked at tools, especially projectile points.  And in looking at these artifacts, historians have almost turned them into a type of language. The tools tell us when people came to a place, what they ate, how they hunted, how they lived, and maybe even what they believed.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Writers,

Today we’re writing about places in Colorado that are important to us. You’re writing  about a place you’ve been to many times before, but when you write about it, you’re going to see that place in a new way. You’re going to understand that place in a way you haven’t before. That’s what writing does for us. It shows us what we haven’t seen before.

Writing also helps us take ownership of a thing. When you write about something, you’re claiming it. These places that we’ve been to many times before might just seem like places. But when we write about them, we stick our flag into their ground; we say that they belong to us.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Students,

You develop a skill. You use that skill to add value to something in the world. People pay you for the value you added to that thing.

That’s about as simple as it gets. But the key is you have to find a way to add value to something. If you’re a chef, you add value to the raw ingredients you buy from the farmer. If you’re a factory worker, you add value to raw materials by changing them into something people will buy. If you’re a teacher, you add value to your students’ time by teaching them what they would not learn if they were on their own.

What value will you add?

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Students,

A new year offers a chance for a new start. Many people make resolutions–eat healthier, exercise more, read more books. But they often give up before January is even over.

That’s because we’re not very good at making ourselves do things that we’re not very good at. We think, if we try really hard, we’ll be able to do it. But we never take the time to actually learn how to do it.

So instead of a resolution, I want you to think about what you want to learn. Maybe it’s juggling. Maybe it’s playing an instrument. Maybe it’s something as simple as whistling with your fingers. No matter what the skill is, the process of learning it makes us better humans.

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

The news of the world can be overwhelming–disasters, famine, war, poverty. It’s tempting to turn it off and forget about it. And if we did, we might not notice much difference in our lives. At least at first.

But we’re part of the world. And the same forces that make things happen in the Xinjiang region of China are also at work in the Rocky Mountain region of the U.S. Learning about them is essential. And though we’ll never be able to control those forces, we might learn to live with them, and we we might learn to ease a little of the world’s suffering.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Practitioners,

I’ve been playing guitar for so long that sometimes my fingers just kind of know where to go. Sometimes when I think of a sound I want to play, I just play it and it comes out right. And man, that feels pretty good.

It’s not like this is rocket surgery. I’ve been playing the same type of simple music over and over for thousands of hours. The songs are all very similar. I’ve just been able to pick up the patterns and structures in them.

But still, it feels good to get good at something. And it’s made those thousands of hours of practice and failure worth it. I look forward to thousands more.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

My grandpa would be 96 today. He achieved a lot in his life: served in World War II, raised four children, owned his own grocery store, and ran organizations that helped the sick and elderly. Of course, I didn’t know all this when I was growing up. To me, he was just grandpa, and what I remember is that he always had a smile on his face.

And when people were talking about him at his funeral, that’s what they remembered too. Everyone talked about how kind he was to everybody, no matter who they were or what they had.

It’s nice to accomplish things in this life. But how you treat people will be your lasting legacy.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

We’re learning some crazy stuff about the physics of sound. To think that the most beautiful music is nothing but various vibrations disrupting the air molecules that travel towards these tiny little bones in our ears is pretty incredible.

And it’s even more incredible to think about how people didn’t have to know exactly how sound worked to make beautiful music. As long as people have been people, we’ve been entertaining each other by organizing noises into something we call music.

It just goes to show: You don’t have to totally understand something to make it into something beautiful.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck