If I could share anything with school leaders across the country, it would be this quote from writer Derek Thompson, staff writer at The Atlantic. (He’s writing about writing and writers, but you can just as easily substitute “school leadership” or “school leaders.”)

I wish there were a formula for growing one’s “ego epidermis” to the perfect level of thickness. There is not. All I can say is that writers of all ages should stay away from the extremes of hypersensitivity-to-feedback and obliviousness-to-feedback. Seek out wise criticism. Reserve time in your week for the regret that comes with getting things wrong. I promise the feeling will go away, and something else will appear in its place, which is learning. I write to learn. Maybe some people don’t, but I’m not sure what they’re doing with their lives.

Source: Why Simple is Smart.

A pack of cards. A flight of stairs. A quiver of arrows. A swarm of bees. A congregation of worshippers. To these well known collective nouns I would add a new one and my personal favorite: A conversation of books.

This one is currently happening on my coffee table (and in my mind).

Avoid all living rooms from now on due to the possibility of elephants.

The Klingbrief wheel keeps turning, as our editors and writers scour books and research journals and periodicals and podcasts and keynote lectures (etc.!) to offer encouragement and instruction and training and nudges and provocations to teachers and school leaders across the globe.

The work of education has never not been challenging. And it seems to require more nuanced understanding and practice with every passing year. Klingbrief can help.

The October issue will remind you about the importance of offering time, space, and grace to your students — and yourselves. It will equip you to build community, to cultivate belonging, and to reach beyond your typical models of thinking (and thinking about thinking). Best of all, it will invite you to take apart — by questioning — some of what we take for granted in order to rebuild — by imagining — some of what we might cherish. Dig in.

It’s nearing peak fall foliage season in my part of the world. That’s inspiring me to shake the digital tree — the wilderness I wander online — and share the most interesting and beautiful leaves I’ve seen lately.

Here’s one — a screenshot of a screenshot of a poem by William Bronk. The last line is as good of a summary of RW, since August, as we are likely to find. Also, and more important: it’s a perfect frame for the week, portioned out as it likely is already. You can either make a career out of pushing against constraints, or you can find ways to praise and cherish them.

Source: a Tweet from Tom Snarsky.

Since school started, I’ve been trying to post something at RW Monday through Friday. I’ve mostly hit this target, with some experiments thrown in, and I’d like to continue to hit it. But that’s going to take some counterintuitive planning. In order to mostly succeed over the long term, I’m going to have to commit to not being perfect. And to routinely filling up my tank so that it never goes completely empty. The latter is just bad for the vehicle, right?

So I’m going to take off the last week of every month — even if I’m feeling great and filled with writing ideas. That last part is critical. I think my contribution will last longer, and have more impact over time, if I rest before I’m broken.

As for you, dear reader, I’ll also make a suggestion.

The point of the daily post was to help us both to build a habit. I wanted to connect with you each morning or at least predictably. Many of you have told me that you like starting your day this way. Or reading RW during your first coffee break of the morning. Or wrapping up your day with it, as a way to transition between work and home.

I love all of that, and I don’t want to get in the way of habits that are helpful to you. So during each of my “break” weeks, I suggest you still show up for your RW time. Keep the appointment, because it’s not so much an appointment with me as it is an appointment with yourself. You could scroll through the archive if you want. Better yet, though, you can just leave the 5 or 15 minutes completely open and let your mind go wherever it wants to. You could think about how your actions are lining up with your values and beliefs. You could check-in on progress on those goals that are most important to you. You could take the time to actually figure out what goals are most important to you. You could jot down a quick note of gratitude and send it to the intended recipient. Just don’t try to do too much. Tanks, this week, are for filling.

I’ll see you next Monday.

Steve

Related Posts or Resources

• An interview of note
• On the discipline of not finishing everything (on purpose)
• How to declare email bankruptcy
• Lessons from my dog
• The Schultz Hour

I had a conversation with a friend, colleague, and coach a few days ago, and it caused me to dig up a speech I gave a decade ago to a group of Sussex County (New Jersey) high school students. I’m posting it today because (a) I couldn’t find it in the RW archives, (b) it holds up as an homage to a few things I still care about, and (c) it captures some wisdom from the best coach I ever had. Interestingly, I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately because he recently moved out of New Jersey and a few tributes came through my email from his friends and neighbors. The world seems best when it’s enlivened by warm connections. Blogs, too.

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I want to begin by congratulating all the Scholar Athletes here tonight.  It’s rare to be recognized for excellence in one category . . . and even more rare to be recognized for both your athleticism and your accomplishments in the classroom.

And so it is first and foremost humbling to address you and even more to try to fulfill my charge, which is to leave you with something of value.  But I will try. 

I graduated from Pope John High School in 1994, and I was fortunate enough to be a Scholar Athlete, too.  I think the standards must have been lower back then.  My father tells me that when I attended this same dinner, I actually fell asleep during the speaker’s remarks . . . so I’ll understand if some of you nod off.  What comes around goes around.

I make my living in a few ways.  I’m an administrator at the Montclair Kimberley Academy in Montclair, New Jersey, and I write books and magazine articles.  These activities, especially the latter, have allowed me to travel and meet interesting people and build a small audience of “fans” who follow the work that I do. 

But none of these things qualify me to speak to you today. 

What qualifies me, I think, is a respect and reverence for the time of life that you are on the verge of completing.  I’m a firm believer that high school is not just a pathway to college.  It’s not a means to an end.  It’s a process that can give you much of what you need to build a successful life. 

Sure, you will need to pick up certain skills to be a surgeon or a lawyer, but high school can give you the intangibles – it can teach you about how to treat people and how not to treat people; it can teach you about how to pursue your dreams with honesty and integrity.  It can help you establish, in other words, firm foundations for your character and your ethics. 

I’m not implying that you have to go out and learn these things tomorrow.  The fact is, you have already had the experiences.  Maybe in your freshmen year.  Maybe last week.  You just have to go back to them, dust them off, pull out the lessons, and return to them as needed. 

For me, two moments in high school stand out as particularly instructive.  They guide me almost daily, since they relate to teamwork, on the one hand, and individual performance, on the other. 

Since basketball was pretty much my life in high school, these are both basketball stories.  I’m going to tell them to you today not only to share the lessons, but also to model for you the process of learning from your past and particularly of learning from your high school experiences.

The first story is called “The Worst Best Team in Sussex County.” 

When I was a sophomore, I was lucky enough to be called up the Varsity team – or so I thought.  The team was filled with great seniors.  They could shoot the lights out and play great defense.  They were physically tough and aggressive.  A few of them were even college prospects.  I was excited to lace up my shoes next to them.  But the shine only lasted a few days, a few practices.  I quickly realized there was something wrong with the team.  I was young, so I couldn’t put my finger on it.  But something just didn’t feel right in the locker room or on the bus.  Something just didn’t feel right on the court.  We were losing games we shouldn’t have lost, and barely winning games we should have won by double digits. 

I’ll never forget the practice when my coach told us to meet in the film room rather than on the court.  We crowded around the television as my coach played a video he had edited together from various games.  There were two scenes in the video.  In the first one, one of our players fell down. He had taken a pretty hard hit; the ref blew the whistle; the game stopped. Eventually, he pulled himself off the floor and walked to the foul line. 

The second scene was more exciting and more of what we expected to see in a highlight film – one of our players dribbled the ball past a few defenders and dunked it. 

Our coach let us watch each scene a few times, and then he asked us what we noticed.  We described the dunk but said that the rest was pretty boring.  He played both scenes again – and eventually we were silent.  We didn’t notice what he wanted us to notice.  An orchestrated tension mounted. And then coach cut in:

In the first scene, when one of our players fell, no one helped him back to his feet.  Not a single teammate offered him a hand.  In the second scene, when one of our players dunked the ball, a crowing achievement for a high school basketball player from Sussex County, no one on our team gave him a high five or a pat on the back.  No one celebrated with him or because of him. He looked around, expectantly, and then ran back down the court. 

“These two scenes tell the whole story of our season,” coach said.  “They demonstrate exactly why we aren’t winning more games and exactly why we haven’t yet lived up to our potential.” 

He was right.  And he’s still right.

You can be the greatest athlete on the court or the smartest person in your company . . . but if you can’t make your team work with you, if you can’t build a great team around you, you will never go as far as you should.  You can’t win a team game alone, and most of what you will do in your lives, outside the classroom, is a team game.  When you’re asked to collaborate on a group project in college . . .  when you’re part of a study group in law school . . . when you organize an event for charity . . . when you start a family. . . All of these are team games.  And if you don’t help your teammates off the ground when they stumble or pat them on the back when they soar, your teams will underachieve.  You will underachieve.

The second story is called “The Worst Best Pass of My Life.”  This one involves the same coach in a different season.  It was my senior season this time, and my team was having a good year – a much better year, in fact, than we should have been having.  With only a few seniors on the team, and only one senior with any true experience, we were exceeding all expectations, winning games we shouldn’t have been winning, and blowing out teams we should have only beat by a few points.  I was certainly a little bit arrogant by the mid-point of the season. 

In one game, a game we were easily winning, I caught a long rebound near the left side of the court.  I looked down the court and saw one of my teammates streaking toward the basket.  I reached back like a quarterback and launched a “hail mary” style pass – he caught it and laid it in while getting fouled. The crowd went wild — so wild, in fact, that I didn’t hear my teammate calling my name when he came in to replace me.  My coach had pulled me out of the game right after the pass, and he left me at the end of the bench for the rest of the game.

I was outraged and humiliated, and I sulked until I had the chance to confront him the next day. 

“Why’d you bench me, coach?” I asked him. 

His answer was precise: “When you throw a pass like that, everyone in the gym can tell exactly where the ball is going.  That pass only worked because the team we were playing wasn’t very good.  If you throw that pass against a great team, they’re going to steal it.  And if you throw that pass at the wrong time in the game against a great team, we’re going to lose.  It’s my job to make sure that doesn’t happen.  It’s your job, as my team captain, to understand.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise to you that my coach, Tom Fox, won hundreds of games and ended his career as a local legend.  At that moment, he was teaching me about the way the smallest details contribute to our success and our failure.  To have enduring greatness, to win seasons instead of just games, to have a great career, you have to practice perfectly.  You have to practice the way you hope to play – whether you’re playing the game of basketball or the game of life. 

You’ll notice a trend in each of these stories.  They are all about failures.  A failing team, a moment when a coach benched a player: if you had asked me when I was your age if I would talk about these moments in public when I was my age, I would have laughed in your face.  Not a chance.

It’s difficult to try to learn from failure while it’s happening . . . it’s much easier to try to learn from a day like today, where someone else is telling you that you’ve made it – where the stars seem to be aligned and the applause is tied directly to your actions and efforts.  Don’t get me wrong, I hope you enjoy the rest of the evening . . . you deserve it.  Being named your school’s “Scholar Athlete” is pretty great. I hope you enjoy the rest of the things that go well in your high school careers and beyond.  But don’t forget about the things that don’t go well or that didn’t go well.  Don’t bury these experiences.  They just might contain lessons that will last, lessons you can return to as you shape a meaningful, productive, and happy life.  Lessons you might share one day in a speech wherein you’re actually trying to pass on something of value.

If you’re joining RW this week, I’m going to try to keep us focused on a recent Charter interview with Executive Coach Katia Verresen. It resonated with me — as it likely will with some of you — because of the way Verresen so clearly seeks to support creative and meaningful work. I want to savor the interview, and I suggest you do the same.

To facilitate that process, I’m going to leave some focused notes below. (All quoted material comes from Verresen.) Give these suggestions a try or at least carry them around with you and hold them up against your day-to-day reality. You can then read the whole interview over the weekend*.

• For meeting schedulers: Consider starting every meeting 5 minutes after the hour. In tandem, encourage attendees to use those 5 minutes to disengage from prior tasks and to take a few breaths before your meeting. This scheduling move seems important to me not only because it might slow down the pace of the day, but also because it could improve meetings by giving people a rhythm around preparing for them. I’m not simply talking about “reading the agenda” or the memo in advance; I’m talking about preparing one’s mind and body for the tasks, and team, ahead.
• If people go back-to-back, from meeting to meeting to commitment to engagement, “cognitive drag lasts about 23 minutes.” Not good. See the previous bullet point.
• How to use an hour (when you’re not in a meeting): “When we’re doing deep thinking work, 52 minutes is very good for us. More than that and we start to flag.” So that’s 50 – 55 minutes on-task, followed by a break. I’ve been saying this same thing for 30 years because a teacher I had in 8th grade once told us to do our homework that way. “Work for 50 minutes,” she said, “then do whatever the heck you want for 10 minutes. Then, make sure you stop your break at 10 minutes and get back to work.” For some reason I believed her, and I used my trusty Casio watch to time my splits. To this day, when I’m really in a groove, I naturally break up my hours this way.
• Move before solving: “After we workout, we have greater focus and clarity for up to two hours.” This principle is worth considering, especially if the problem you’re trying to solve isn’t urgent or you aren’t up against a deadline. As I said at the start, the goal in savoring this particular article is to hold ideas — like “after we workout” — up to reality, especially if you’re feeling lackluster about your current processes or outcomes or both. What’s the worst that could happen? And the best?
• On pausing, if just for 10 seconds: “We have to remember that we are biological humans and there are very simple things like moving our neck, looking around, and locating ourselves in the day that suit our social nervous system. It registers safety. It takes less than 10 seconds.”
• On celebrating even the small wins: “When [high performers] reach their goals, they move on and completely dismiss what they’ve created. That’s disrespectful of their work and their team. It’s really important to pause, reflect, and celebrate that we went from zero to one with a journey in between so that we can capture the wisdom, the learnings, and the richness of the experience. That way, it’s easier to create and go after our next challenge.”

*Of course you can just skip my notes and read the whole interview whenever you want. But my point in designing this post in the way that I did is to work with people’s habits. If you show up here every day looking for something new, you’re going to find the same thing for a few days this week. The only way to make it new is to make yourself new.

Source: Charter