letters to my class

December 5, 2012

December 4th, 2012

Dear Performers,

I love playing guitar and singing for people. I like doing it way more than people like listening to it, but I’ve been lucky enough in my life that people put up with it. Even though I’ve spent a lot of time playing my guitar in front of people, I’ve spent way more time practicing it by myself. Performances are just the icing on the cake. The cake is actually baked through practice, practice, practice.

I had a lot of fun watching the choir concert last week. I could tell the choir members worked hard to learn their songs and perform them to the best of their ability. I know the band and orchestra concerts coming up will be just as good. But remember, all you can do on the night of the performance is put the frosting on the cake. If there isn’t much cake, then no amount of frosting can make it satisfying.

Today, we’ll take our Unit 4 test. If you’ve been working hard in class, doing your homework, and taking responsibility for your learning, you just have to put on the frosting today.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck
December 4, 2012

December 3rd, 2012

Dear Historians,

How did we get where we are today? That’s the big question that historians try to answer. As historians we’re not too interested in the why questions. Those questions are too complex and elusive. Many times, we don’t really know why things happened, but with research, insight, and hard work, we can piece together how things happened, even things that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago.

History is never a simple story. The story of Cortes and the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire isn’t the simple story of Spanish power overwhelming the Aztecs. As we read yesterday, some Aztecs joined the Spanish because they were unhappy with Aztec rule. Similarly, not all Spaniards approved of Spain’s conquest of the Americas. Today we’ll read about Bartolome de las Casas, a Spaniard who spoke out against the enslavement and mistreatment of native peoples.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck
December 3, 2012

December 3rd, 2012

Dear Reckoners,
Based on what we know, we figure out new things. That’s kind of the foundation of math. First humans started counting things. Perhaps it was how many stone tools they had. In that case, they only had to count up to five or six. Then, they started living in larger groups, and to count people, they needed larger numbers. Then, they started planting wheat, harvesting it, and giving it out to people in their group. This mean that had to take numbers and break them up into parts. Eventually, they decided that just counting numbers didn’t represent everything they needed to represent, so they came up with in-between numbers. We call those fractions, decimals, and percents.

Numbers are powerful things. They run our world. If you want to have a voice in how the world runs, you need to learn how to do things with numbers. It’s really that simple.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck
November 27, 2012

November 26th, 2012

Dear Explorers,
Imagine you’re on a ship that’s sailing into unknown waters. Sailors who have gone this way before have never returned, and there’s a good chance that you won’t either. If you do, however, great riches and fame await. You expect to see things that people from your culture have never seen before. You expect to be amazed (or to die).

What kind of courage does it require to do something that’s never been done before? What kind of person chooses to leave the comfort of their home to explore the dangers on the blank parts of the map? What would tempt a person to risk so much? We’ll read about these explorers’ thirst for riches and fame, but we’ll also learn about the uniquely human urge to do things that were previously thought impossible and to reveal truths about the world that were never imagined.

Happy Exploring,

Mr. Heimbuck
November 26, 2012

November 25th, 2012

Dear Writers,

When author Kevin O’Malley visited Meadow two years ago, he said that he writes because he likes to “control people’s minds.” When you put words on a page, you create a new reality. If your words are inviting enough, readers will enter it and never want to leave. You don’t have to be a professional writer to do this. If you can write clearly and powerfully, you too can “control people’s minds.”

Writing clearly doesn’t require a magic gift or special powers. It mostly requires practice and hard work. Writers are people who write everyday. Writers are people who spend a lot of time writing and even more time rewriting and even more time thinking about what they’ve written and ways they can make it better. Writers are people who care about language. And writers are people who are always starving for the food that is other writers’ words.

We’re all writers, and we all have stories to tell. I can’t wait to hear yours.
Sincerely,
Mr. Heimbuck
November 15, 2012

November 14th, 2012

Dear Knuckleballers,

R.A. Dickey just won the Cy Young award. That means he was honored as the best pitcher in the National League. Dickey has been around the league a long time and for most of it, he wasn’t a very successful pitcher. He never threw the ball very hard, so a few years ago he decided to reinvent himself as a knuckleball pitcher.

A knuckleball is a type of pitch that moves slower than other pitches but that moves in unpredictable ways because of the way the pitcher grips it. The only way you can become a good knuckleball pitcher is by throwing the pitch over and over and over and over. In R.A. Dickey’s first game throwing the knuckleball, he gave up 6 home runs. But he didn’t give up. He kept throwing it, over and over and over and over. Slowly, he got better, but he never stopped he never stopped practicing. Now, he’s the best pitcher in the league. He didn’t get there because he was more gifted than the other pitchers. He got there because he persevered.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck
November 14, 2012

November 13th, 2012

Dear Model Makers,

My favorite place in Denver is the diorama hall at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. I could spend a whole day just looking at those amazing dioramas and marveling at how the Galapagos Islands, the Smokey Mountains, and Kalahari Desert have all been magically transported and recreated in one building in the middle of Denver, Colorado.

Those places come alive in the dioramas because of the care the curators took when they created the models. Indeed, those models can sometimes teach us more about the real thing than the thing itself. That’s because when we make a model we have to think about the parts, how they interact, and how they create the whole.

Today, we’ll make models of body systems. You’d think that we’d be experts about body systems because we’ve been living with them our whole lives, but through model making, we’ll learn so much more.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck
November 13, 2012

November 12th, 2012

Dear Blood Pumpers,

Our body is constantly carrying-out processes that keep us alive. Fortunately for us, most of those processes happen automatically, and we don’t have to worry about them. One such process is circulation. You probably know that blood is super important to keeping us alive (blood is often used as a metaphor for our deepest and truest selves), but our circulatory system is really just a giant delivery system. It’s a huge network of blood vessels that keeps blood flowing to all of our body cells and back to the heart, lungs, and digestive system to get more oxygen and nutrients.

Network is an important word that we’ll see again and again as we study the processes that keep us alive. A network is a bunch of individual things working together to accomplish one goal. The circulatory system is one of many, many things in nature that work in a networked way. By studying the circulatory system as a network, we practice the type of thinking that will better help us understand the rest of the world.

When we learn something new, we should think more about the how of learning than the what. The what is easily forgotten, but the how stays with us forever.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck
November 12, 2012

November 11th, 2012

Dear Scientists,

I’ve told you before that we know a thing by its properties. Rather than just saying a thing is a thing because it look like that thing, we have to think about the parts of the thing and closely study how they interact to make the thing the whole that it is. Think about polygons. They are what they are because of the their sides and angles. For some substances, however, properties aren’t easily seen. For these substances, we have to think of creative ways we can carry out tests or experiments to reveal those hidden properties.

This is what we’ll do today. We’ll look at four different powders and reveal their properties by burning them, tasting them, mixing them with water, and mixing them with chemicals. We’re not just interested in the reactions (although reactions can sometimes be pretty cool!), we’re interested in what the reaction tells us about the true properties of the substance.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck
November 6, 2012

November 6th, 2012

Dear Future Electors,

It’s an important and exciting day in our democracy. Today is election day. We decide who will represent our country for the next two, four, and six years. We’re not just electing a President today. We’re also electing Representatives, Senators, judges, school board members, and deciding on Amendments and Referendums.

I hope we know who wins all the elections tonight, but there are expected to be many close elections, and we might not know until tomorrow. Or we might not know until even later. Regardless, we will be following it closely in class. Today, we’ll read about how all citizens gained the right to vote and hold our own mock election.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck