letters to my class

Dear Humans,

Have you noticed the black Colorado license plates on the road? If you haven’t, start looking for them. You’ll find them everywhere.

A recent newspaper article said the black license plates are much more popular than the state thought they’d be. People seem to really want them. Why? I think it’s because people love to stand out. Even when it comes to something standardized like licensing our motor vehicles, people want to do it in their own personal way.

Because that’s what people do–live with pizzazz. You can see it from the beginning of time, like the handprints on those caves in Argentina. Even thousands of years ago, people had the urge to scream out, “I’m here!”

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

New year, new you. If only it were that simple. People can change. And we can all do a little better–keep our desks a little cleaner, turn in our homework a little more often, read more books. But we can’t ever escape that old us. They keep hanging around.

Which is a good thing. Because think of all we’ve gathered throughout our lives–good habits (and bad), good friends (and maybe some enemies), knowledge and experiences and advice. Who’d want to get rid of all of that?

The only way we can ever hope to change ourselves for the better is to tap into all that stuff that old us has gathered in the past. New us can only ever come out of the old us.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

The other day we were learning about another explorer’s search for the Northwest Passage and one of you asked the best question that a historian can ask: “How do we know what happened in the past?”

And the best answer is that they wrote it down. Sometimes they wrote it in bits and pieces, and they often wrote it in a different language, sometimes one that has been lost to time. But history remembers those people who write things down.

There are other ways–oral traditions and archaeological findings and historical re-enactments–but the written word is our most reliable connection to the past. Just as it will connect us to the future.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

The Oxford English Dictionary just called “rizz” the word of the year. Short for “charisma,” it means one’s ability to attract or impress others. 

When I was growing up, we had a different word for it. And my parents had a different word for it. And my grandparents had their own word for it. Because, as the saying goes, every generation thinks they invented love and romance. 

And though all of these words describe roughly the same thing, there have been changes to courtship over the years. And we know that because our language reveals it. When things change–even slightly–the words we use for it change as well.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

When I’m folding laundry, the to-be folded pile is mountainous. Same with the pile of dirty dishes next to the sink. When I look at them, I just want to give up.

So I don’t. I reach over blindly for the next dirty dish or clean t-shirt, scrub it or fold it and triumphantly place it on the completed pile. And that’s where I focus instead: the strainer full of the dishes I’ve already washed or the neat stacks of already-folded laundry.

What’s to be done isn’t going anywhere. So there’s no reason to dwell on it. Rather, focus on what you’ve already accomplished and know that it will only continue to grow.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

I’m a big fan of flags. I fly one outside of my house. I collect them. I love to look at them, learn about them, and think about them. And I think I like them because they’re kind of a problem.

They’re a problem because they try to use a few simple colors and symbols to represent a nation’s identity–something that people have been battling over since the country’s start and will continue to after it’s gone. Like all symbols, they mean different things to different people, and we can’t always put that meaning into words. We just feel it in our guts.

And that’s the kind of problem that doesn’t have a solution; it can only be lived with.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

Each morning in the classroom, the first thing I do is plug in chromebooks. And it might be the best part of my day. Because when I’m doing it, I think it’s the most important thing in the world and only I can do it. 

In reality, if I forgot, it would probably be okay. And I could come up with a different system where all the chromebooks charge at once. But this is what I do instead.

We all have responsibilities throughout the day. And the best way to do them is the best we can. If we imagine nobody else in the world can do them as well as us, then a monotonous, boring chore turns into a sacred task. 

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

Yesterday we learned about the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. That was a big deal–-a turning point in history. And it was a long time ago and it happened across the ocean to people who were a lot different from us. 

People often ask me, “How do you make history relevant to the students’ lives?” And I say, “I don’t.” Sure, I try to explain how past events led to the present. The languages we speak, the things we believe, the way we live.

But the real reason we learn history is so we might make our own lives relevant to history. That we might lead the kind of lives that show up in history books 435 years in the future.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

I work really hard to get the last bit of peanut butter out of the bottom of the jar. If the first dollop was as difficult to get out as that last smidge, I’d probably give up on the whole enterprise.

But there’s something about that last little dab. We’re willing to work for it, even if our hands get a little sticky.

It’s probably the same reason some of you like to write with the short nib of an over-sharpened pencil. You have to hold it uncomfortably by the ferrule, you write with painstaking slowness, and your handwriting is a mess, but there’s something joyful in the salvage.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt

Dear Humans,

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. We live in a time with lots of AI-generated images and videos and Beatles songs, and it’s easy to get tricked into believing something is real that isn’t really real. 

So you’re going to have to be on the lookout. There are some technical tricks for figuring out if an image is real, but the best test is the too good to be true test. If an image makes your side look all good and the other side look all bad, it’s probably fake. 

If it’s something you really, really want to be real, then you should probably give it a second look.

Sincerely,

Mr. Curt