letters to my class

Dear Humans,

Yesterday we did that yarn toss greeting where someone holds the end of the yarn and tosses the skein to the next person and on and on around the circle. And you end up with a web that connects everyone–a nice visual metaphor for a classroom community.

And then we tried to undo it. And we thought it’d end up all neat and tidy back on the skein. But, of course, it got tangled on the very first toss. And any attempts to untangle it just made it worse.

Because that’s what happens when we get into one another’s lives–as classmates, friends, partners, colleagues–our strings get knotted. Your string will tangle up with countless others in your life, but each of those knots matters.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

I say “good luck” a lot. You’re getting married? Good luck. Have a kid on the way? Good luck. Taking your kid to college? Good luck. Starting a new job? Good luck. In a new relationship? Good luck. Buying a new car? Good luck.

Perhaps I ought to say “congratulations” or even offer a bit of advice. But I think good luck is better. Because we all know roughly where to steer our ships. We have maps and charts to consult (or YouTube), and we probably even have a loyal crew to help us with the mast and the rigging.

What we really need is a little wind in our sails.

Good luck,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

425. That’s how many minutes we have each school day. When you smash those three digits together, it looks like a lot. And some afternoons when the math lesson drags on it sure feels like a lot. 

But then I look at some of you and think about how I had your older brother or sister in my class what feels like not very long ago. Though the calendar says it was actually many, many, 425s ago. And oh how they fly.

So we do the best we can to fill each one. Some days we do better than others, but no matter what happened yesterday, we know tomorrow gives us a new 425.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

I used to walk down the parking lot, look at the damage done to people’s license plates, and judge what kind of driver they were. If their license plate was dinged, dented, or dangling, I thought I knew exactly what it meant: they were a danger behind the wheel.

And then one day I was driving north on I-25 and a piece of busted up tire came out of nowhere and smashed into the front of our car. And left my license plate beat up, bent, and limply hanging from one screw.

And it taught me something that I should have already known: any judgment you put on others will eventually came back around to you.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

Over the first week of school we’ve been getting to know each other by sharing the three special items we’ve put in our sacks. We’ve seen family pictures, video game controllers, special rocks, stuffies, and toy cars. And you’ve done a great job explaining how each item represents you.

But remember that we can never fit our whole selves into a brown paper sack. This is just a glimpse. Plus, what’s in our sack now won’t always be there. Those sacks are open and they always will be. We take old things out and put new things in all the time.

So the best thing we can offer one another is patience and grace. We’re all changing and growing and figuring it out. 

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

Humans see faces everywhere. Car headlights, tree trunks, clouds. Every once in a while you’ll read a news story about someone who saw the face of the Virgin Mary on their grilled cheese sandwich.

Because our brains are excellent pattern detectors. And faces are nothing but patterns. Eyes, nose, and mouth arrayed a certain way and POOF!–a unique individual. Move the nose down just a little bit, and you have a completely new person with a different set of dreams, fears, and quirks.

Today, we’re going to make faces out of non-face stuff. You will be shocked at how easy it is because you’ll tap into a skill you didn’t even know you had.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

I’ve been teaching long enough to know that people don’t do the right thing just because they’re told. They do it because they were going to do it anyway or because it’s the normal and easy thing in that environment.

But convincing people to do right is really hard. And nothing is less convincing than rules. When I tell students to keep their desk orderly, their eyes glaze over; but if I tell them about that one time a student’s messy desk spontaneously combusted, they are mesmerized. 

Because we’re wired for stories. They’re how we make sense of the world. They’re how we figure out who we are. And if you get really good at telling them, you’ll have more power than all the rules in the world.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

I love first days because you can be relatively certain that everyone is wearing a clean shirt. Because come September, you’ll see me teaching some nonsense about how we’ll use prime numbers to communicate with extraterrestrials and you’ll think, “Didn’t he wear that shirt yesterday?” 

But it won’t matter by then because we’ll know one another so well that we’ll know the true selves hidden beneath the shirts (be they clean or dirty). And one reason we’ll know each other so well is because of the strong first impression we made back when we were wearing clean shirts.

First impressions matter. But they mostly matter in how they wipe themselves away and get washed into the ocean of true camaraderie.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

Have you ever heard someone say “You’re putting the cart before the horse”? It means your priorities are backwards and thus ineffective, like trying to have a horse push a cart instead of pulling it.

In school, the cart is how well each of us does individually–what we learn, grades we get, stories we write, projects we create. And the horse is how well we get along with classmates. We learn from and with other humans, so treating them well matters. Otherwise, our cart is stuck in the muck.

Our carts are all on different paths, and in the future we’ll hitch them to different horses. But this year, we’re all yoked to the same beast. Let’s make sure that horse is moving. 

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

You’re not supposed to know the correct answer. When I ask a question that has an easy answer, it’s only to get your mind thinking about a more complex question that doesn’t.

Because there are only correct answers on worksheets–useful exercises, but far-removed from reality. And I’m not really interested in the answers on your worksheets, anyways; I’m interested in the process you used to get them.

Real life is messy. And all we can do is follow processes to get to solutions that are workable (until they fail and have to be reworked). So that’s what we try to learn to do in school–engage with the messy process of figuring things out.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt