Easing back into the RW practice after some time away. . . . This quotation, from an article worth reading in full, is challenging me in all the right ways as I prepare to head back to the classroom next Tuesday.

As instructors, our challenge is to try and imagine how people learn who are different than we are. In all likelihood, most of our students are not going to learn, think, and engage in exactly the same ways that we do. Our goal is to try and be prepared, as much as we possibly can, for students who have different lives than we do. (Jenae Cohn, PhD, and Courtney Plotts, PhD)

H/T to Eric Hudson for sharing this, in my world, first.

I just read the first paragraph of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a book in which George Saunders presents and unpacks short stories “in which four Russians give a master class on writing, reading, and life.” The opening paragraph is so good that I stopped reading and immediately shared it with some of my colleagues, a former student, and now all of you. May you have someone in your life committed to helping you achieve your iconic space, to helping you become defiantly and joyfully yourself.

As you (may) know, the content in Klingbrief is not pre-arranged. Instead, it traces the zeitgeist of independent school education. What are educators reading and thinking about? Perhaps more important, what do they care about enough to read, think about, synthesize, write about, and submit to our editorial board? This month, you’ll find our typical random spread along with a tight focus on podcasts trying to help educators and students make meaning of the final days of 2020 and the first few days of 2021 — a dark and strange time in American (recent) history. The February issue is here, the archive is here, and the submission portal is here — all best viewed on a computer of some sort rather than a phone.

If you read Make Yourself Clear, you’ll know how much I love this visualization from the Twitter account of Andrew Wilkinson.