letters to my class

Dear Humans,

For me, spring arrives when I get my big, fat book that previews the upcoming baseball season. Stats for every player. Projections for the coming year. It has it all.

I look forward to it every year because it excites me for the upcoming baseball season; but, most of all, I look forward to it because it puts me in the middle of the conversation about baseball.

Life is about being part of various conversations–about politics, about your work, about your hobbies. That’s how humans figure things out. And your job is to make sure you are part of the conversation. Books help.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Students,

There’s a lot you can do to make the world a better place. But the best thing you can do is work together with others. If you take shorter showers, you’ll save some water. But if you convince hundreds or thousands of other people to do it, then you can save millions of gallons of water.

Individual actions are mostly about the kind of person you want to be. And that’s important. But when you organize people to do something, then you will start to create the kind of world you want to call home.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Students,

“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Maybe your parents or grandparents have told you that. If not, now your teacher has. And it’s true. If you want something of value, you have to pay for it.

We live in a world now where many things seem free: YouTube videos, news, information. But they’re not. You pay for them with your time and attention. And a lot of time these “free” things aren’t worth much. They might be biased or misleading or just flat-out lies.

So remember, you get what you pay for. If you want something of value, expect to give something of value for it.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Writers,

More meaning comes through our tone of voice and body language than the words from our mouths. A scowl or a smile tells more than a thousand words. That’s what makes writing so difficult: we can’t put hand gestures, facial expressions, or the timbre of our voice on the page. It’s just the words.

But I believe there are things we can only say through writing. And writing allows us the time and space to think about what’s really important.

Great writers have great power: not just the means to influence people, but the ability to explore the ideas that soak into every part of the world.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Collectors,

Collectors are my kind of people. And my favorite collections are the weird ones: barbed wire, paper airplanes, barf bags. You can start a collection from anything, and it can be totally free. The most important part of a collection is how the collector organizes it, not the stuff itself.

The world’s first museums were nothing but glorified collections. Amateur scientists took the weird and wacky stuff from the natural world and put it into a room.

The world is a big, confusing place, full of lots of seemingly random stuff. Collectors make sense it by searching for related bits and pieces and giving them meaning.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I can’t think of anything that’s more true. We make clear what we think is important by how we spend the moments in our lives. We become the people that we practice being in those moments.

Life is much too long to worry too much about how efficiently we spend every waking moment; but life is far too short to waste those moments on activities that aren’t important to us.

So think about how you’re spending your time today. What will your moments add up to?

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Readers,

In kindergarten you learned to read by matching letters to sounds. As you learned more words, you didn’t have to think so much about the letters. But then you learned that those letters on the page didn’t just naturally show up there. Someone–someone a lot like you–put them there for a reason.

And now your job as a reader is not just to know what sounds the letters make or what meanings the words have, but to think about why the writer wrote what the writer wrote.

And if you learn to do all of that, then you have a big shiny key that can unlock almost any door in the world.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Puzzle-Solvers,

There’s something about the way those tans fit together in a tangram. They are alike and different in ways that makes it seem like they’re having a conversation with each other, working together to make something beautiful.

A thing itself is not as important as the things it connects to. If you just have one tan, you can make only one shape. But if you have all seven pieces, you can make endless shapes.

When you meet a new thing, don’t just ask what it is. Look and see what it connects to. Look and see what beautiful combinations you can build with the pieces that surround it.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

Yesterday I was driving down Colorado Boulevard when a car passed me driving 20 mph over the speed limit. When I heard the “whoosh”, my head whipped around in surprise. I’ve heard people say that “everyone speeds.” But yesterday on Colorado Boulevard I only saw one person doing it. And I saw about a hundred people driving at or around the speed limit.

You’ll hear similar things in your life about how “everyone does [fill-in the blank].” But it’s not true. Most people most places most of the time do what they’re supposed to do.

Don’t let the rule breakers and troublemakers set the norms for you.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Coloradoans,

We need to have a talk about Colorado. We keep learning about people, explorers, and settlers who came to Colorado, but Colorado didn’t even exist until 1861–after Pike failed to climb his mountain, Bent blew up his fort, and San Luis became the first town in the state.

Before that, the rectangle we call home was claimed by native tribes, Spain, France, the United States, and Mexico. Part of Colorado even used to be Texas. But then it became a quadrilateral for lots of reasons having to do with the Civil War, slavery, and the politics of 1861.

Things change. We study history so we can understand these forces of change. Because they’re still working today.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck