letters to my class

Dear Thinkers,

When my wife tells me about someone I don’t know, I always ask the same question: what kind of animal are they?

A lot of times the world and what’s in it is beyond our understanding. We can’t know or name a thing precisely. But comparisons help. If we can say what a thing is like or put it in a category with other like things, we can begin to get a sense of the thing itself.

So when you come across something new, before you ask what it is, ask what it is like. You’ll probably get a better answer.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Writers,

If you learn to put your ideas into powerful, meaningful words, you can accomplish anything. Reading is important; math is important; science and social studies are important. But I think writing is the most important subject in school.

But to be a great writer, you have to be a writer all the time. You have to read like a writer, you have to see the world like a writer, you have to breathe like a writer. You have to always carry that writer’s notebook with you. And most of all, you have to believe that you have something to say about the world, and you have a way to say it that no one else does.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

It’s great to do well in school. If you do well in 4th grade, you’re more likely to do well in 5th grade, and more likely to do well in high school, and more likely to go to college, and more likely to get a good job.

But little in life is guaranteed. And there are a lot of life-upsetting dangers that lurk along the path.

What really matters is that you have loving people in your life who support you. And that you know how to find more of those people. And the best way to find more loving and supportive people is to be one yourself.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

Yesterday morning I sat in traffic and blamed the car in front of me. But that car was stuck because the intersection in front of him was blocked. And that intersection was blocked because the intersection in front of them was blocked, and it all went back to the earlier wreck that closed a road we weren’t even on.

And then I looked around and saw all these semi-trucks and thought about my morning cup of coffee that came all the way from Guatemala, and how I live in this awesome world where I can get anything I want from anywhere in the world. But sometimes I sit in traffic.

We’re all connected. Our choices and actions have consequences we can’t always see. Think about that before you just blame the car in front of you.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Readers,

People are going to come at you with their truths, and they’re going to do all they can to convince you they’re true. So you have to be smart. But more, you have to be wise. You can’t just know things; you have to know how things work.

So we’re reading nonfiction texts about weather. And we’ll learn a lot about weather, but more importantly, we’ll learn how nonfiction texts work. What we’re really learning are how ideas work and how humans communicate them.

If we learn that, we’ll be ready to weigh all of the truths that people bring us.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Learners,

If I just followed recipes, step-by-step, I could probably feed my family pretty well. But I don’t think I’d learn that much about cooking. So I try to think about what the recipe means. I look for connections between recipes, I think about categories of ingredients, and I try out new things.

And I mess up a lot.

Math is the same way. If you faithfully and automatically follow the algorithm, you’ll probably get the right answer. But I don’t know if you’ll learn much about math. But if you think about why things work and how things work (and make a lot of mistakes), you’ll get the ultimate reward of math: not getting the right answer, but knowing how to solve problems.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Learners,

Most of what you learn in life will be things you teach yourself. These lessons will be the patterns you create out of your life experiences.

All I can show you are some of the ways that other people have made sense of their experiences. I can point out a few patterns that have been useful over time. But by the time I do that, you should already have thought about your own.

Don’t wait for me, or the media, or other authorities to figure out your world for you. You have to be your own best teacher.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Fans,

The Rockies and Dodgers have played a combined 324 games this season. They’ve traveled approximately 70,000 miles. They’ve been at it for the past six months. And after all of that, they are completely and totally tied.

So it all comes down to one game. The winner of the game is the winner of the season.

In the grander scheme of things, grown men hitting a 9.25 inch sphere isn’t that important. But life offers us lots of unimportant things to pay attention to. My hope for you is that bring passion, discipline, and an active mind to whatever unimportant thing you decide to follow.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Humans,

It’s easy to accept the world as it’s presented to us. It’s easy to believe that things are the way they are because that’s how they’re meant to be. It’s easy to convince ourselves that people are supposed to look, act, and behave a certain way because of where they’re from, how they were born, or what they look like.

But if you want to make a meaningful life, you’re going to have to figure these things out on your own. You’re going to have to ask hard questions about the way things have always been. And you’re going to have to imagine another way, a better way.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Mistake Makers,

I fry a lot of eggs. When I first started, I screwed up all the time: broken yolks, too hard yolks, too runny yolks, bad flips. And I thought my mistakes meant that I just wasn’t good at frying eggs.

But I kept at it. (Hunger motivates!) And I still make mistakes, but now I learn from them. When I screw up, I think about what goes wrong and figure out ways to fix it next time. Rather than seeing my mistakes as an indictment, I see them as information.

Being good at something doesn’t mean you don’t make mistakes; it means you know how to learn from them.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck