letters to my class

Dear Language Learners,

This may sound strange, but I loved grading your spelling tests over the weekend. English has borrowed words from so many other languages that’s it often weird and confusing. But it’s also really rich for communicating ideas. Ideas just seem to live and grow inside of these words and it’s so much fun to string these words together in new and interesting ways.

My hope for each of you is that you learn the powers of language so you can use it to make sense of the world and also to make change in the world. Language is the best tool we have for that.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Talkers,

At school we talk to each other. To make sense of problems, to figure out how texts work, to find out what we believe. These things all come about through conversation. And conversation is more about listening and thinking than talking.

So we’ll continue to practice having conversations because we can only ever learn from other people and while reading their words on a subject can be very helpful, there’s nothing quite like a face to face conversation.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Strivers,

The things I really enjoy now–cooking, reading, writing, playing music–were really, really hard at the beginning. 

When you first play the guitar your fingers bleed and the sounds don’t sound like music. When you first start to cook the food is bad and you burn things and there’s always that fear that you might poison yourself. When you write, you have to get down a lot of bad stuff amidst the tiny percentage of good stuff. 

The key to success in all areas is exactly the same: failure followed by trying again and again. And even after you get pretty good at these things, the only way to get better is to keep failing.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Readers,

The internet tells me that yesterday was #NationalReadABookDay.

Boys and girls, that’s every day in our world.

Millions of people have read John Steinbeck’s book Cannery Row, but when I first read it (and when I reread it), it sure seems he wrote it just for me. That’s what good books do. They connect with you in ways that are so meaningful that you believe the author is living in your brain. Music, movies, television, and video games are great, but they just can’t match the personal connection that happens with books.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Learners,

You set your goals–like reading 40 or more books in a year–but you can only reach it by doing a bit at a time–one page at a time. As  you reach milestones, you clelebrate, but you know the real reward is in the kind of person you’ll be after you read those 40 books.

So figure out what you want to do, find out the steps you need to take to do it, and work at them one at time, each day, each hour, knowing that the hard work is always worth it.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Revisers,

There’s a story that the famous artist Michelangelo once said that carving an elephant from a block of stone was easy because you just knock off all the stuff that doesn’t look like an elephant.

Today we’ll begin looking closely at the stories we’ve been working on and knock off the stuff that doesn’t look like a story.

You all have stories to tell. My job is to teach you some tricks to tell them. These aren’t my tricks. Writers have been using these tricks since the beginning because they work.

And these tricks won’t just improve your writing. They might also make you see the world in a new and different way.
Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Learners,

I’m wearing my college colors today. I learned so much when I was in college, but when I left I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a job. I did, however, know how to learn whatever I needed to know to do whatever I wanted to do.

No matter what you want to do with your life, you’re going to have to keep on learning throughout your life. College is a great place to do that, but your learning doesn’t stop when you turn your tassel.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Imaginers,

Yesterday my four year old told me that princesses were only real at Disney. I explained to her that even those princesses were only pretending, but that through pretending we can make something that’s better than real.

“Can I have magic if I pretend?” She asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “Imagination is the most powerful type of magic.”

It makes me think of Frankenstein’s monster. We can all imagine what it looks like and how it walks and probably even tell Monster stories. But Frankenstein’s monster came out of an author’s imagination (and monster stories she borrowed from). 

Mary Shelley’s magic was far beyond Dr. Frankenstein’s. She created something that will never die.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Adventurers,

As I was eating that cricket taco the other day, I wasn’t thinking about whether it was “bad” or “good.” I was thinking, “I’m eating a cricket taco and this is a cool experience.”

If you only do, see, eat, or read things that you think you like, you shut yourself off from the rest of the world. I think it’s better to approach new things with an open mind. 

As individuals we only get to experience a tiny sliver of this vast universe. If we want to ever understand anything about that universe, we must allow in experiences other than our own. 

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck

Dear Writers,

Writers aren’t people who have the most interesting or important things to say. They’re just people who have figured out an interesting way to say it.

Your personal narrative topic might not be too exciting. Mine is about a squirrel in my kitchen. Most people have had a wild animal in the house, many of them probably worse than a squirrel. But the quality of my personal narrative is all about how well I tell the story.

Robert Frost wrote a poem comparing fireflies to the stars. That sounds pretty boring. But he did it in such a beautiful and meaningful way that we still read it and memorize it one hundred years later.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck