Common Reading

2025 Summer Common Reading Assignment

Due August 20, 2025

Submit your assignment to your Pre-Arrival tracker.

The Assignment Prompt

First Year Preceptorial is a required course for all new first-year Knox students. Preceptorial is all about engaging new ideas and complicated material and thinking about how to make sense of them. It is also a class that asks students to do this engaging and thinking through writing. To help you begin to process the book, we are asking you to engage in a reflection. We will do more of this in class—this is just your first chance to reflect on what you have read and to start to articulate what you think about it.

For this first assignment, you have two tasks. First, you should read the First Year Common Reading, Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect by John Inazu. This book is timely to our current political and social climate and will challenge you to interrogate your own beliefs, articulate your values, and see the world from other perspectives. The book is structured around the academic year which will help you anticipate the many things you will encounter at Knox in your first year.

Your second task is to write a response to two specific chapters of the book. You may choose between August, October, January, March or April. Each chapter deals with a specific theme and your job is to reflect on how these themes have appeared in your own life.

To complete this assignment, you should:

1. Choose two episodes (one each from two different chapters you select) and describe how you see similar issues playing out in your own life or how these episodes help you understand an experience in a new way.
2. Explain why you chose the two episodes you are reflecting on. It will help to take some notes, underline passages in the text, and/or summarize important points.
3. Write your reflection in the form of a letter to John Inazu, the author of the book. Prof. Inazu will not receive your letters, but they will go to your First-Year Preceptorial instructor before you arrive at Knox in the Fall.
4. Compose a letter of at least 600 words—and be sure to check your spelling and grammar!

Please note that the use of generative AI to complete any portion of this assignment is explicitly prohibited. This letter is meant to share your thinking with your FP instructor so they can get to know you, how you think, and what your values are. This assignment gives you an opportunity to share more about yourself, how you see the world and how you wrestle with complex issues.

Be sure to keep a copy of your reflection, because you will be discussing your writing at New Student Orientation with the rest of your First Year Preceptorial class.

A Note on Paper Copies of Learning to Disagree

For students with a domestic U.S. address, we will mail a paper copy of the book to you in early July. If you have an international address, your paper copy of the book awaits your arrival to Knox. In the meantime, students outside the U.S. can check out an e-version of the book from the Knox Library. Instructions are here. [MyKnox login required.] Ebooks are limited in number. If you have a U.S. address, please wait for your paper copy and permit international students to access the ebooks.