This is an update of a column that originally published Dec. 4, 2019.
While I generally discourage young adults from using credit, at some point they do need to prove they can manage debt.I
The widely used FICO credit score, which is derived from information in your credit file, ranges from a low of 300 to a high of 850. Your score — along with other financial factors — directly affects how much interest you pay for the money you borrow. Your score also influences your insurance rates, as well as your ability to get an apartment or even a job.
But how do you show a lender that you can manage debt well if, to get credit, you have to have a positive credit history? That’s what one reader wanted to know.
“My child graduated college, moved home, got a good job, opened a bank account at a small local bank with direct deposit, and then applied for a credit card at a large national bank,” the reader explainedduring an online discussion. “The bank turned [my child] down, however, saying, ‘the credit reporting agency serving your area has reported no credit history for you.’ What does a new graduate need to do to establish a minimal history sufficient to get a credit card?”Advertisement
It might surprise you, but it doesn’t take very long to establish a good credit history. So, there’s no need to panic on behalf of your teen or young adult child.
If you plan it right, you can help your young adult child build an excellent credit profile just in time to qualify for a loan or apartment lease without needing a co-signer.
Four years ago, I helped my 24-year-old daughter establish credit with the goal of buildinga good credit score. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how we started the process.
Step 1
As our daughter was getting close to graduating from college, my husband and I made her an authorized user on our joint credit card. This tactic is called “piggybacking.”
The authorized user will benefit from the positive credit history of the primary cardholders. In our case, we both had credit scores well above 800.
Treatment of authorized users can vary by card issuer. But generally, adding an authorized user to your credit card account lets the credit history of that particular card be transferred to the authorized user’s credit files. Keep in mind, positive and negative information on the card can be added to the authorized user’s credit reports.
The point wasn’t to allow our daughter to use the card much — and she didn’t. She just piggybacked on how we handled the card, paying it on time, keeping balances super low and paying them off every month.
Exercise caution when adding an authorized user. Although the person has your permission to use the card, there is no contractual responsibility to pay any of the charges on the card. So be extremely careful about using the piggybacking strategy.
Step 2
We had our daughter apply for a general-purpose credit card.
She was turned down because her income was too low. At the time, she was working as an intern with a small monthly stipend. But we just wanted to test whether our credit history alone was enough to get her approved.
Having been rejected, she then applied for a secured credit card, which is backed by money deposited into a savings account. For example, if the required deposit is $200, that becomes your credit limit.
If the young adult already has a banking or credit union account, start the search for a secured card at that institution. Bankrate regularly profiles the top secured-card offers. On its list of best secured cards for November 2023 are several credit cards with no annual fees, and most require a deposit of only $200.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare
Shop around to avoid cards with high fees, and make sure the issuer is reporting to all three credit bureaus — Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. Don’t worry too much about the interest rate, because the balance should be paid off every month.
Our daughter was approved for a secured card from her credit union with a $250 limit.
Step 3
The next part is crucial: We told her to make only a few small-dollar purchases each month and to pay the entire balance off before the due date.
The two biggest factors to getting and keeping a good credit score are paying your bills on time, and amounts owed. The lower the amount of debt you are carrying the better.
By the way, carrying balances from month to month and incurring interest does not help your score. The credit score rewards an open and active account in good standing with a zero balance.
Our daughter stuck to the plan and used the secured card to just buy gas and a subway card.
“I paid off the balance as soon as the charge posted,” she said.
With no credit history of her own other than the boost from being an authorized user when she applied for the secured card, her credit score was 698, which was pretty good.
Step 4
After just three months, her credit score jumped to 737. Once it hit that mark, we advised her to stop using the secured credit card. She tucked it in a drawer.Advertisement
A few months later, her score had increased to 743.
Step 5
Several months after getting the secured card, it was time to apply for a regular credit card, one not backed by money in a savings account. She applied at the same credit union that had given her the secured card.
She repeated the strategy of limiting her use of credit, keeping her utilization rate to about 10 percent of her available balance. And she never charges more than she can pay off by the next due date.
Eventually, her lender raised her credit limit to several thousand dollars. Her most recent FICO credit score was 810. The average U.S. FICO score as of April was 718.
In all, it took about a year for my daughter to establish a good credit history, which led to building a very good credit score. FICO says a good credit score is generally considered to be in the 670 to 739 score range. Anything higher is exceptional.
Mission accomplished. She has established that she can handle debt.
B.O.M. — The best of Michelle Singletary on personal finance
If you have a personal finance question for Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary, please call 1-855-ASK-POST (1-855-275-7678).
Credit card debt: If you’re in the habit of carrying credit card debt, stop. It’s just a myth that it will boost your credit score. For those looking to get out of credit card debt, see if a balance transfer is right for you.
Money moves for life: For a more sweeping overview of my timeless money advice, see Michelle Singletary’s Money Milestones. The interactive package offers guidance for every life stage, whether you’re just starting out in your career or planning for retirement.
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By Michelle SingletaryIf you have a personal finance question for Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary, please call 1-855-ASK-POST (1-855-275-7678). Her award-winning column, “The Color of Money,” is syndicated by The Washington Post News Service and Syndicate and carried in dozens of newspapers. Twitter
Anne Lamott is an American novelist and nonfiction writer. Her latest book, “Somehow: Thoughts on Love,” will be published in April 2024.
Today I woke up old and awful in every way. I simultaneously cannot bear the news and cannot turn it off: It’s cobra hypnosis — Gaza, Israel, the shootings in Maine. The world is as dark as a scarab. I have two memorial services on my calendar this week. A dear friend is in the hospital waiting for a liver, dying. She keeps assuring me, “I ain’t in no ways tired,” and I say, “Oh, stop with that or I’m not going to visit again.” I’m exhausted just driving 90 minutes to and from San Francisco to see her.
My body hurt quite a lot when I got out of bed this morning, and I limped around like Granny Clampett for the first hour, until it unseized. Worse, my mind hurt, my heart hurt and I hated almost everyone, except my husband, my grandson and one of the dogs.
I don’t think I could have borne up under all this 20 years ago when I thought I knew so much about life. That was not nearly as much as I knew at 33, which is when we know more than we ever will again. But age has given me the ability to hang out without predicting how things will sort out this time (mostly — depending on how I’ve slept).
In many of Albert Bierstadt’s Western paintings, there is a darkness on one side, maybe a mountain or its shadow. Then toward the middle, animals graze or drink from a lake or stream. And then at the far right or in the sky, splashes of light lie like shawls across the shoulders of the mountains. The great darkness says to me what I often say to heartbroken friends — “I don’t know.”
I don’t know. Not yet.
My white-haired husband said on our first date seven years ago that “I don’t know” is the portal to the richness inside us. This insight was one reason I agreed to a second date (along with his beautiful hands). It was a game-changer. Twenty years earlier, when my brothers and I were trying to take care of our mother in her apartment when she first had Alzheimer’s, we cried out to her gerontology nurse, “We don’t know if she can stay here, how to help her take her meds, how to get her to eat better since she forgets.” And the nurse said gently, “How could you know?”
This literally had not crossed our minds. We just thought we were incompetent. In the shadow of the mountain of our mother’s decline, we hardly knew where to begin. So we started where we were, in the not knowing.
In the center of many Bierstadt paintings, you sometimes see animals grazing or drinking. They’re fine, they’re animals; they are just doing animals. But they are not the point — the point is the light. No matter how low you are, the light can reach you. It falls on animals, including us. This is positively biblical. Some of Bierstadt’s animals are lined up at the water as if they’re going to march onto Noah’s Ark. Or they’re huddled together as on a park bench, just hanging out. You have to wonder if the older deer are slightly surprised upon waking every morning, as I am, fumbling around for their glasses.
The animals never seem to have anywhere to go. I used to have lots of places I had to get to. I had to go out for this or that, and it was an emergency — graph paper! I suddenly, urgently, needed to drive to town for graph paper. Also, in the old days when there was something to celebrate, I’d go out to a nice restaurant with friends. To celebrate now, I might exuberantly skip flossing for a night, and maybe if the news is good enough, the hip exercises. Wild times.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare
In my younger days when the news was too awful, I sought meaning in it. Now, not so much. The meaning is that we have come through so much, and we take care of each other and, against all odds, heal, imperfectly. We still dance, but in certain weather, it hurts. (Okay, always.)
The portals of age also lead to the profound (indeed earthshaking) understanding that people are going to do what people are going to do: They do not want my always-good ideas on how to have easier lives and possibly become slightly less annoying.
Now there is some acceptance (partly born of tiredness) that I can’t rescue or fix anyone, not even me. Sometimes this affords me a kind of plonky peace, fascination and even wonder at people and life as they tromp on by.
The price of aging is high: constant aches, real pain and barely survivable losses. But each time my hip unseizes, it reminds me that this life is not going to go on forever, and that is what makes it so frigging precious.
Another gift of aging is the precipitous decline in melodrama. Enjoying how unremarkable life is takes practice and time, and then the little things start to shine and delight. Life gets smaller and in its smallness it starts winking at you. On my first day back in New Mexico recently, the high desert looked barren and brown. Pretty, yes, but a little dead. Then the tiny desert flowers, yellow, lavender, magenta and baby blue, made their way into my consciousness, and the earth’s shades of ochre and red started to warm me, and before long the formerly dead desert was alive and awash in dynamic, undulating streams of color.
Sometimes at the right or the top center of Bierstadt paintings is a trippy splash of light, often a mystical, jagged slash that breaks through dirty-looking or white-fire clouds. There might be bright reflections, or long, slanted fingers of sun shining down with religious airs, organ music playing softly in the background. Puffy rainclouds glow. All say, “Yes, there is the deep dark, but we have some light as well.”
Will my brothers or I inherit our mother’s Alzheimer’s? I don’t know. I do know that I recently parked in front of my house and sort of forgot to turn off the engine. Three hours later, a formerly standoffish young neighbor knocked on my door to tell me this, and I pretended to have known. I said the battery had been low and so I was letting it recharge.
“Ah,” she said.
Now she is sweet when she sees me. We wave to each other when we pass in our cars, reflecting a new affection. Reflections say, “In the dark, there’s still some light around. So don’t ever think things are too dark. We’re not going to give you the entire reserve, but we just want you to know it is there. And more may be on its way.”
Mariana Perez missed schoolmore often last yearthan she does now. The eighth-grader in Maryland is part of a longtime Montgomery County program to help middle school students improve attendance and feel more connected to their education.F
She said she sees the difference in her grades.
“C’s to B’s, and B’s to A’s,” said the 13-year-old, who meets weekly with a volunteer mentor and others who are pulling for her in the county’s Truancy Prevention Program. “It helps to have advice,” she said this week.
Even though the worst of the coronavirus pandemic may be finished, students across the country continue to rack up absences at alarming levels. An analysis released in October showed two-thirds of the nation’sschools faced severe absenteeism in 2021-2022, with no signs yet of a widespread rebound in the year that has followed.
High levels of absenteeism often derail students. They are less likely to read on level by third grade. They are more likely to score lower on standardized tests and get suspended in middle school, research shows. They are at greater risk of dropping out of high school.
As school districts search for ways to tackle the issue, the Montgomery County program Mariana participates in is well-regarded and expanding. It is meant to identify the root causes of absenteeism with each student individually and find ways to overcome them. The idea is encouragement and relationship-building, not punishment.
“It is absolutely, abundantly clear that it is needed now more than ever,” said John McCarthy, state’s attorney in Montgomery County, who led the effort to create the program.
Inspired by a similar effort in Baltimore, the program was started in two middle schools in 2010. It now serves 19 middle schools, with six more to be added in the spring and another four in the fall of 2024. The goal is to reach all 40 middle schools in Montgomery County, McCarthy said. Seven to 10 students from each school participate.
The 10-week program depends on volunteer mentors, school staff members and employees of the state’s attorney’s office, where truancy prosecution is viewed as a last resort. Students meet with them one at a time, once a week, reflecting on how they are doing, why they were missing school and how to do better. They talk about their grades.
“We just try to build up rapport,” said Michael Durso, a retired school principal and former county school board member, who has volunteered with the program for five years. “It’s: How are you doing? What are the barriers that get in the way of coming to school?”
Some students miss school because of family needs, including tending to younger siblings. Some take jobs to help support their families. Some lack transportation to get to school if they miss the bus, and increasingly some struggle with anxiety and depression. Many want to avoid school because they are being bullied.
One student faltered until his third try at the program, said George Simms, an assistant state’s attorney and chief of the community outreach division. Then one day, it seemed to click: When the boy missed his bus in the morning, he came up with another way to get to school — taking a Metro bus and walking a mile, Simms said.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare
“He is completely turned around,” he said.
Students are considered truant in Maryland when they are absent without an excuse for more than 20 days in a school year. In Montgomery County, a Truancy Review Board handles about 10 truancy cases a month but strives to work with families; very few are steered into the court system, Simms said.
If a parent were charged in a truancy case, the offense would be a misdemeanor that could carry jail time or a fine but would most likely involve probation on the condition of school attendance, Simms said.
School system leaders, who collaborate with prosecutors on the program, similarly say that students benefit most when schools join with families.
“Punishing parents doesn’t do a single thing to help us build relationships with them,” said Steven Neff, the school system’s director of pupil personnel and attendance services.
Not every child in the Montgomery County program reaches their attendance goals, making them eligible for a “graduation” ceremony. Graduation rates for the program vary from about 60 percent to 70 percent, McCarthy said. Still, he said: “I think every child improves.”
In D.C., where several efforts focus on the issue, some have shown promising results but are small or underfunded, said Danielle Robinette, a policy attorney at the Children’s Law Center. She said programs with an individualized approach have been more effective than those that are punitive.
In Montgomery County, the problem is so extensive that it will require many more programs and efforts to effectively meet the need, said Durso, the former school board member and program volunteer.
In recent years, Montgomery and other school districts nationally have tracked absences by calculating rates of “chronic absenteeism,” when students miss 10 percent of their school days for any reason. Montgomery’s rate worsened during the pandemic, but the first quarter of this year showed improvement.Montgomery officials have announced a plan to combat the problem.
Students involved in the voluntary prevention program — once known as Truancy Court — are referred by schools and must have parental consent to participate. They receive points for their accomplishments over the course of the program and receive prizes.
At the program’s “graduation” ceremony — held at the county courthouse — students are handed certificatesof achievement. Speeches are given. Parents and grandparents look on, snapping photos.
“I was one of the kids with the lowest, lowest grades,” one 11-year-old boy told the audience at a graduation this year, according to a recording of the event. The sixth-grader said he wrote goals into a book every week as part of the program. “Every single week I completed every single achievement that I wrote,” he said. His grades rose markedly.
“I appreciate being in this program because it is one of my achievements in my life and will be the first achievement I have ever done,” he said.Share91Comments
By Donna St. GeorgeDonna St. George is a national education reporter for The Washington Post, where she has been a staff writer since 1998. She previously worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times
This essay discusses the 2022 fantasy romantic drama Three Thousand Years of Longing directed and produced by George Miller, starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton.
It is imperative that I provide a preamble of sorts about storytelling and its potency to affect the world before I begin discussing Three Thousand Years of Longing.
“The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.” ― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings
The best stories, I believe, are like onions. To enjoy it, you have to peel it to get beneath its surface. And by doing so, it won’t leave you unaffected. With each layer you peel, you get watery eyes. You peel and you peel, each covering lending a hand to enhance flavor.
Some onions are more pungent than others. There are sweet, red, yellow, shallots, and green. Like stories, onions are one of the largest plant genera with hundreds of different species. Genre upon genre, our world is filled with stories, some disguised as truths, some swallowed as lies. There are bound to be preferences or exceptions, like honor among thieves.
It’s not just the kernel of a story that matters. It’s how a story is told. It’s how you weave the story that wins the heart. There are stories that burrow in my mind for days, weeks and months. There are stories that have spooked me for years.
Since the dawn of time, storytelling has been man’s most powerful weapon. We often forget that it is stories that have kept us alive. Stories are the alchemy of life, the yolk of our existence. Science is what enables us to make sense of it all through logic. But stories, that’s a different practical magic. Tempestuous, bizarre, magnificent, and tragic. Stories are what keep us flourishing, loving, and hopeful.
Storytelling has been used by the viziers of every kingdom known to man to navigate kings, sultans, and their enemies. Stories were used to improve empathy, justice, order, cooperation, and other critical elements when we say the word civilization.
But the secret to a powerful story, what has egged mankind for all these time, is longing.
Longing is the delicate string that binds our today with tomorrow. Longing is the elixir of youth, the serum that frightens many of premature death, death before fulfillment. Longing is what keeps ghosts and spirits roaming through the halls of dilapidated mansions. Longing is the canon that expanded kingdoms across vast continents and deep oceans, built legendary empires through barren deserts and white mountains. Longing is what weakened even the mightiest of kings and brought giants to their knees.
Although released as a movie, Three Thousand Years of Longing is based on a 1994 short story ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ by A.S. Byatt.
The story opens with a lonely but independent woman named Alithea Binnie. A narratologist by profession, Alithea is a specialist in world literature, which takes her all over the globe, examining stories and conducting lectures on intertextual analysis. Her work combs through metaphors, cultural symbolisms and languages.
But almost from the beginning of the story we see Alithea harboring a secret. She possesses an ability to see mythical creatures and literary characters, some almost demonic. There seems to be an enmesh between her real world and her fantasies. As viewers, we can only guess if it’s a bane, a blessing, or a red flag for a medical condition such as a brain tumor that is presenting her “hallucinations.”
At a conference in Turkey, Alithea visits the Grand Bazaar and picks up a antique glass bottle.
“How can we tell if it’s genuine?” Alithea asks her seller.
“You can see specks of blood from the glass blower’s lungs in its design.”
One might shudder at the thought of such a revelation. Alithea’s colleague advises her to select a different ornament, one that’s less “flawed” and more pleasant by historical account. But Alithea refuses. All the more, she is drawn to the aberrant nature of the glass bottle.
Back in her room, Alithea attempts to scrub clean her new find, and out comes a Djinn. He tells her that he is to grant her three wishes but she ought to choose wisely. There are conditions to the rules: he cannot grant more wishes or for absolutes, such as to erase all the ills of the world. He can only grant her wishes pertaining to her personal desires.
Alithea is all too familiar with narratives of genies and Djinns. They’re known to be tricksters, out to fool men. “Only bad luck comes out of all the wishes,” she tells the Djinn. “Moreover, with a life fulfilled, there is nothing I’d wish for.”
Alithea: There’s no story about wishing that is not a cautionary tale. None end happily. Not even the ones that are supposed to be jokes.
The Djinn is angered by Alithea’s incurious and insouciant demeanor with his gifted presence.
“It is impossible. Everyone has a desire.” Djinn declares. “But you and I are the authors of this story, and we can avoid all traps.”
“I am fulfilled,” replies Alithea defiantly.
Alithea was more interested to know how the Djinn got trapped inside the bottle. As a lover of stories, she’s curious about the Djinn’s life granting others their wishes.
And so begins a series of stories that encompasses three thousand years of love, loss and servitude.
“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” ― Leo Tolstoy
The Djinn begins his recount by professing his love for the Queen of Sheba. They were inseparable lovers until King Solomon came to court her attention. At first Sheba was disinterested. A half Djinn herself, the queen presented a challenge for Solomon to test his wisdom. This includes answering the question known as difficult to man: “What women most desire.”
Here, the story takes a twist. It has been told to us for centuries that Solomon called Sheba to come to him in “humble submission.” According to Djinn, who was there to witness as Sheba’s lover, it was Solomon.
Solomon was obsessed with conquering the queen in her own bed. He also was deceptive. He sought the help of spirits from other realms for the answer. Upon whispering the secret into her ears, Solomon won over the queen. The Djinn was caught spying on them, thus, Solomon used magic to entrap the Djinn and cursed him to be a genie in a bottle.
For 2,500 years the genie languished in solitude, submitted to pangs of anger and hopelessness. The conversation between Djinn and Alithea marks a cornerstone to our understanding of both characters.
Djinn: And there I am, left to my own oblivion, with no one to hear my voice, no one to know me, nor feel me, nor sense me. You can’t imagine.
Alithea: Well, actually, I can.
Djinn: Can you imagine the loneliness? How it might overwhelm?
Alithea: I can.
Alithea: We exist only if we are real to others. Do you agree?
Alithea: I do.
Djinn: This, then, is our fate, Alithea. If you make no wish at all, I will be caught between worlds, invisible and alone, for all time.
“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.” ― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
The subsequent stories shared by the Djinn further demonstrates the power of storytelling. Eventually, Djinn succeeds in winning Alithea over to make her wish for a desire. His weaving of stories invokes Alithea’s deep seated longings — those she knew existed, and those she never knew she wanted.
Djinn was right about one thing when it comes to human nature: we are never without a secret desire waiting to be fulfilled. It’s difficult to accuse Djinn of manipulating Alithea’s vulnerability. All the while, it appeared as if she was the one in full control of their discourse.
That brings us to what makes Three Thousand Years of Longing a modern masterpiece: how one can collapse the story and interpret it in a hundred ways.
I offer one perspective.
Throughout the movie, inserted in subtle clues in various scenes, discerning viewers can construct a hypothesis that the tales have little to do with Djinn and his folly. Through the frames of different characters and assorted lovers, through episodes of deception, betrayal, greed and death, we are looking at the life story of Alithea herself.
“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.” ― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
There is an existential question for all of us here: What is our story that we have been holding back from the world?
This is rather telling from their conversation. As we’re taken into the second chapter of the story, we begin to see how Djinn and Alithea’s worlds begin to converge.
Alithea: This is the story you’ve been avoiding telling me all along.
Djinn: This is the story I’ve avoided telling even myself.
As tempted as I am to expound Three Thousand Years of Solitude deeper, I must resist. I feel it would be a disservice to anyone inclined to watch the movie. It’s best to allow yourself to deduce the story and formulate your own interpretation. That, I believe, is the beauty of its story arc.
But I will leave you with this: What I found profound about the connection between Alithea and Djinn is the evocative vignettes centered on love as a theme. They mirror our flaws.
Each portrayal of love is flawed by design. Some viewers may feel dissatisfied with this, or even see it as a provocation. Yet I find this approach realistic, mature, and though-provoking.
Once again, with its strength tied to the power of storytelling, each vignette is a cautionary tale of what love means to different people, influenced by time, culture, and the old time villain, selfish greed.
We often think that war is the downfall of humanity. Through each tale, it is in fact love that has been the cause of our ruin. Our desire for what cannot be; our longing for what has been lost; our insatiable thirst for a love that does not belong to us; our incapacity to temper the power of love when it is in our hands. I find this relates to the earlier conversation at the Grand Bazaar about specks of blood from a glass blower’s lungs trapped in an intricate glass bottle. Nothing that’s authentic comes devoid of human suffering.
Suffering, languishing, and longing are cardinal components of our human existence. Perhaps that is why we are in constant search of a reason to believe in what’s elusive. We are a cup filled to the brim yet never full.
For us, human love needs to be owned, to be caged, to be imprisoned, like a genie in a bottle. Love is forced to be the panacea to all our ills and yearnings. We idealize love to end wars and bloodshed. Yet we find reasons to create them through hate and jealousy.
It is love that entrapped the Djinn in the bottle in the first place. It is love for stories that isolated Alithea from the rest of her world.
Like Djinn’s second lover, Zefir, who wished for knowledge through ferocious reading, we are obsessed with the pursuit of solving everything. Yet we are incapable of handling the enormity of consciousness and its consequences when given all access.
We seek fulfillment only to keep rewriting the journal of our desires. We know what we want based on seeing what others have. We live by comparison. Nothing will ever be enough, because at the heart of longings, we know not of what we truly seek in life. That in itself, is our human tragedy.
Alithea: Do you know the answer to her question?
Djinn: What women most desire?
Alithea: Yeah.
Djinn: Do you not know? If you don’t know, I cannot tell you.
Alithea: Well, surely we don’t all want the same thing.
Djinn: Madam, your yearnings are not at all clear to me.
It is upon Alithea’s self-actualization that she willingly releases her love for Djinn so he can be what Djinn needs to be in his own realm: free to grant others their wishes. By doing so, both are finally set free — until they find themselves in a new perpetual, self-constructed prison.
Unless we find the right words to write our story designed for triumph, we shall persist as a tragic hero awaiting an action that will reveal our hamartia.
As for Alithea Binnie, with all that’s been said and done, did her encounter with Djinn really take place? Or did her loneliness and amalgamation of narratology concoct the whole experience? Was she led by her deep-seated longings to an impossible love affair? Or did she finally fulfill her secret desire?
I leave that onion for you to peel. Meanwhile, be careful what you wish for.
Perspective by Maryam Abdullah Washington Post October 24, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
When my son was a preschooler, I welcomed his string of “whys” as a way to help him make sense of the world. But now that he’s a bit older, his questions have gotten more sophisticated, complex and even daunting — sometimes I’m at a loss for how to respond.
But I’ve come to understand, thanks to a growing amount of research, why I don’t always have to have the answers.
Saying “I don’t know” to our kids can make parents feel like we’re failing. We might assume that they find it reassuring to believe that we know everything, or maybe we think there’s something inherently noble about always being right.
Despite our best intentions, though, this approach may not be best for our children’s long-term success and well-being. In fact, research suggests that these unrealistic expectations can undermine our kids’ ability to learn and form meaningful relationships, particularly with people who don’t share their worldview.
We can help set kids up for academic success and better relationships by modeling an open mind, the ability to admit when we don’t know or are wrong about something, and a recognition of our limitations — what researchers refer to as “intellectual humility,” or our ability to essentially recognize that what we know is limited or might be misguided and then learn from that.
At the University of California at Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, my colleagues and I have been working to understand the science of intellectual humility and its implications. As a mother, I have found how impactful this can be for our parenting.
The benefits of intellectual humility
Research on intellectual humility highlights why it’s important to be open to rethinking our attitudes and beliefs, and to help our kids do the same, for ourselves and for the greater good.
Compared to people with low intellectual humility, research shows that people with high intellectual humility tend to investigate and scrutinize misinformation more often, be more discerning of the strength of an argument, are intrinsically motivated to learn and are more engaged with feedback — all crucial skills for academics and for life. They tend to be more supportive of free speech rights even for groups they don’t like and more forgiving of people with whom they’ve had conflict. They are also more inclined to uphold values that benefit others, like empathy, gratitude, altruism and benevolence. These are great skills to have in a friend.
On the other hand, less intellectually humble people tend to belittle or disparage their opponents’ intelligence and character and are often unwilling to “friend” or follow them on social media, according to research.
In these ways, intellectual humility can help counter today’s trend of hyperpolarization: Nurturing open-mindedness can encourage kids to be better citizens by engaging in dialogue with people who seem different from themselves.
Why humility is hard for adults and kids
If intellectual humility has so many benefits, then why can it be so hard to see and declare that we have gaps in our knowledge? Researchers have identified several obstacles that can get in the way of our humble selves.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare
It turns out we’re not deliberately trying to be “know-it-alls” — we’re wired to affirm our first thoughts. “When thinking through an issue, we tend to look for evidence that confirms what we already believe to be true,” says Tenelle Porter, assistant professor of psychology at Rowan University. In research published in the journal Nature Reviews Psychology, Porter and colleagues found that we are more inclined to find evidence that corroborates our initial thoughts instead of evidence that challenges us to revise them. Our kids may also discover that people judge them if they change their beliefs or opinions, like when politicians whose views evolve over time are criticized as “flip-floppers.”
Another roadblock to being humble is our tendency to overestimate what we think we know. “People tend to believe they know the causal underpinnings of the world around them in far greater detail and consistency than they really do,” says Frank Keil, professor of psychology and linguistics at Yale University. That means we tend to misjudge how well we can explain the way complex things work, which doesn’t help our children when they are looking for a good answer. For example, we might describe to our child how a toilet flushes. But when faced with their follow-up questions, we might realize that we really don’t know as much as we thought we did. At times, this can dissuade us from seeking to understand something in a deeper way because we believe we already know enough. And, naturally, the way our children learn will mimic the way we model it to them.
Social pressures can also stifle our ability to humbly revise our ideas, says Elizabeth Connors, assistant professor of political science at the University of South Carolina. “People tend to adopt the political views, values and feelings of those around them because it looks good to do so.” Our social groups shape the way we interpret information and play an important role in our attitudes and beliefs, like our positions on gun control or climate change. We witness this during elections, the horrors of war, school board meeting and in our own neighborhoods.
How we can foster intellectual humility in our children
Create opportunities to discover a variety of viewpoints. “Keeping books that represent different — even disagreeing — perspectives can encourage exploration and discussion,” Porter says. Make it easy for kids to learn about topics and attitudes from assorted frames of reference. For example, encourage your kids to find diverse books during bookstore or library visits. In a similar way, as parents, we can try reading or listening to different legitimate news sources so we go beyond our own bubbles and outside our echo chambers.
Reflect on positive experiences of rethinking. “Consider a time when changing your mind improved your life,” says Daryl Van Tongeren, researcher and author of the book “Humble: Free Yourself from the Traps of a Narcissistic World.” Helping our children recognize when this happens to them — even in small moments — can show them how flexible thinking is a superpower. It can be as simple as our younger kids sharing how they’ve noticed changes in their first impressions about spiders — from fear to fascination — or the taste of mushrooms — from disgust to deliciousness. We can also help our teens share a time when a person with whom they didn’t seem to share anything in common later became a good friend.
Take turns exposing the hollowness of a long-held belief. In his book “Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know,” researcher Adam Grant recommends that we “have a weekly myth-busting discussion at dinner” to help kids become more comfortable recognizing beliefs that were flawed and reshaping them when they have new information. For example, we can explore with our kids some common myths about microwave ovens or the cleanliness of dogs’ mouths. These conversations are bound to provide plenty of opportunities to not only admit what we don’t know to our kids, but also to grow together.
Embracing what we don’t know opens us up to a range of possibilities we hadn’t imagined before. Being humble about our ideas helps us detect our biases and be less self-critical when we’re wrong. When parents show their kids that they’re open to uncertainty, it can be a force for good — in their kids’ lives and in the world.
Maryam Abdullah is a developmental psychologist and the parenting program director at the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley.
Illustration by Eugenia Mello, Art Direction by Shikha Subramaniam.
In the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress sent $190 billion in aid to schools, stipulating that 20 percent of the funds had to be used for reversing learning setbacks. At the time, educators knew that the impact on how children learn would be significant, but the extent was not yet known.
The evidence is now in, and it is startling. The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education. It also set student progress in math and reading back by two decades and widened the achievement gap that separates poor and wealthy children.
These learning losses will remain unaddressed when the federal money runs out in 2024. Economists are predicting that this generation, with such a significant educational gap, will experience diminished lifetime earnings and become a significant drag on the economy. But education administrators and elected officials who should be mobilizing the country against this threat are not.
It will take a multidisciplinary approach, and at this point, all the solutions that will be needed long term can’t be known; the work of getting kids back on solid ground is just beginning. But that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be immediate action.
As a first step, elected officials at every level — federal, state and local — will need to devote substantial resources to replace the federal aid that is set to expire and must begin making up lost ground. This is a bipartisan issue, and parents, teachers and leaders in education have a role to play as well, in making sure that addressing learning loss and other persistent challenges facing children receives urgent attention.
The challenges have been compounded by an epidemic of absenteeism, as students who grew accustomed to missing school during the pandemic continue to do so after the resumption of in-person classes. Millions of young people have joined the ranks of the chronically absent — those who miss 10 percent or more of the days in the school year — and for whom absenteeism will translate into gaps in learning.
In the early grades, these missing children are at greater risk of never mastering the comprehension skills that make education possible. The more absences these students accumulate, the more they miss out on the process of socialization through which young people learn to live and work with others. The more they lag academically, the more likely they are to drop out.
This fall, The Associated Press illustrated how school attendance has cratered across the United States, using data compiled in partnership with the Stanford University education professor Thomas Dee. More than a quarter of students were chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year, up from 15 percent before the pandemic. That means an additional 6.5 million students joined the ranks of the chronically absent.
The problem is pronounced in poorer districts like Oakland, Calif., where the chronic absenteeism rate exceeded 61 percent. But as the policy analyst Tim Daly wrote recently, absenteeism is rampant in wealthy schools, too. Consider New Trier Township High School in Illinois, a revered and highly competitive school that serves some of the country’s most affluent communities. Last spring, The Chicago Tribune reported that New Trier’s rate of chronic absenteeism got worse by class, reaching nearly 38 percent among its seniors.
The Times reported on Friday that preliminary data for 2022-23 showed a slight improvement in attendance. However, in some states, like California and New Mexico, “the rate of chronic absenteeism was still double what it was before the pandemic.” The solutions are not simple. There is extensive evidence that punitive measures don’t work, so educators may need a combination of incentives and measures to address the economic and family issues that can keep children away from school.
Researchers have long known that American students grow more alienated from school the longer they attend — and that they often fall off the school engagement cliff, at which point they no longer care. This sense of disconnection stems from a feeling among high school students in particular that no one at school cares about them and that the courses they study bear no relationship to the challenges they face in the real world.
These young people are also vulnerable to mental health difficulties that worsened during the pandemic. Based on survey data collected in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this year that more than 40 percent of high school students had persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness; 22 percent had seriously considered suicide; 10 percent reported that they had attempted suicide.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, many parents and educators have been raising the alarm about the effects of grief, isolation and other disruptions on the mental health of their children. In addition to reconnecting these young people to school, states and localities need to create a more supportive school environment and provide the counseling services these students need to succeed.
The State of Virginia took a big swing at the problem of learning loss when it announced what is being described as a statewide tutoring program. But high-impact tutoring is labor intensive and depends on high-quality instruction. It is most likely to succeed when sessions are held at least three times a week — during school hours — with well-trained, well-managed tutors working with four or fewer students at a time. Such an effort would require a massive recruitment effort, at a time when many schools are still struggling to find enough teachers.
While tutoring is a step in the right direction, other measures to increase the time that students spend in school — such as after-school programs and summer school — will be required to help the students who have fallen furthest behind. In some communities, children have fallen behind by more than a year and a half in math. “It is magical thinking to expect they will make this happen without a major increase in instructional time,” as the researchers Tom Kane and Sean Reardon recently argued.
A study of data from 16 states by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University shows that the most effective way to reverse learning loss is to increase the pace at which students learn. One way is by exposing them to teachers who have had an extraordinary impact on their students. The center proposes offering these excellent teachers extra compensation in exchange for taking extra students into their classes. Highly trained, dedicated teachers have long been known to be the most reliable path to better educational outcomes, but finding them at any scale has always been difficult. If creative solutions can be found, it will help reverse learning gaps from the pandemic and improve American education overall.
The learning loss crisis is more consequential than many elected officials have yet acknowledged. A collective sense of urgency by all Americans will be required to avert its most devastating effects on the nation’s children.
Before the pomp even really began, Maryland’s inaugural class of Service Year members wore broad smiles and streamed past red-lipped cheerleaders with pompoms to celebrate the country’s first state-run service year program.
Inside the University of Maryland’s Armory on Friday, the pep-rally vibe kicked into a higher gear, sending 280 participants into community-centered jobs across the state, roles meant to help them find a career and give back to the state.
Some will work with legal aid, others in after-school programs for Baltimore City teenagers. Service Year members will work with nonprofits doing environmental work, with huge corporations such as BG&E and in scores of other roles tailored to their interests, state officials said.
The effort is a key step toward one of Democratic Gov. Wes Moore’s signature campaign promises: to eventually create a pathway for every recent high school graduate to spend a year in the workforce in jobs that serve the greater good.
Participants in this year’s pilot program will earn at least $15 an hour and receive a $6,000 stipend for finishing the program, which state officials hope to expand to 2,000 people per year within four years. Service Year members also receive job and financial literacy training, mentorship and career counseling.
“What’s important about Maryland is it’s allowing us to innovate,” said Michael D. Smith, chief executive of AmeriCorps, the federal agency for service and volunteering that gives Maryland $20 million per year. Standing outside the event, Smith said “the nation is watching” Maryland’s experiment with a state-backed option to funnel willing high school graduates into service-centric paths.
Inside the Armory, a color guard presented the Americanflag to a crowd of several hundred. A 20-piece band in full regalia blared as the participants — mostly young people in their late teens or early 20s sporting red polos that said “Service Year Option” — assembled to hear top Maryland leaders praise them. The participants had already completedabout a week of orientation at the University of Maryland’s flagship campus in College Park.
“You are the first wave of showing us a better way, showing us it’s still possible to see the humanity of all people, even across differences,” said Paul Monteiro Jr., Secretary of the Department of Service and Civic Innovation, a new Cabinet-level post Moore created shortly after his inauguration.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare
Monteiro told the crowd a key piece of the program is “recognizing the value that each person has, the talents that each of you bring that we’re going to refine over the course of this service term to give all of you a tangible way to build a life and find your power through service.”
Employers pick up some of the tab of the weekly wages, and the state pays for others through either grants or tax dollars. A legislative analysis estimated the entire new department would cost $16.4 million in the current budget year.
Moore focused his State of the State speech on the value of service to bridge political divides and frequently says “service will save us” during public remarks. During a speech that lasted more than 15-minutes, Moore laid out lofty goals for the program: “We will build civic bonds. We will restore a spirit of community. We’re calling on all our fellow Marylanders to get to know each other again.”
Truth Burney, 23, said she graduated from Howard University with a prelaw major, but wasn’t landing any of the paralegal or legal assistance jobs she applied for. Now through the Service Year option, she’s working at the Community Law Center in Baltimore, helping with legal-aid cases.
“Fresh out of college, I didn’t really have a work background in legal work, and I believe this will allow me to get those jobs I wasn’t getting before,” she said.
On the 1790 Census, Col. Zadok Magruder reported he had 26 people enslaved on his property. Now, about 200 years after his death, Montgomery County Public Schools could change the name of the high school named after him when it opened in 1970.F
A petition filed in February by people in the Magruder High School community says the school’s namesake “does not meet the acceptable criteria for a school name” and cites Magruder’s history as an enslaver.
The unwanted legacies of slavery and racism live on in the names of schools across the country.Several schools across the Washington region have shed namesakes in recent years. In 2021, the D.C. Council voted to rename Woodrow Wilson High School in Northwest Washington to Jackson-Reed High School. Several residents sought to change its name because of Wilson’s discriminatory policies that led to the displacement of some of the city’s Black residents. In October, the Fairfax County School Board in Virginia voted to begin the process of renaming W.T. Woodson High School, which is named after an early schools superintendent who opposed school desegregation.ADVERTISING
And the Montgomery school system has done it before too. In 2019, community members and the County Council president called for Col. E. Brooke Lee Middle School in Silver Spring to be renamed. Lee was a large-scale developer and skilled politician who attached his properties to racially restrictive covenants that limited who could live there. The school was later renamed Odessa-Shannon Middle School, in recognition of the first Black woman to be elected to the school board.
After the county school system received the request about Magruder, it sent a survey to several families and alumni asking whether the name should change. It hired the consulting group Coaction Collective to run six virtual and in-person forums in which people shared their perspectives of the school’s name. Those sessions ended earlier in November. A report is expected to be delivered to the school board before the winter holiday season.
Born in 1729, Magruder became an influential figure during the American Revolution, according to a report from Montgomery History. Hewas a part of the group that wrote a 1774 proclamation called the Hungerford Resolves in support of Boston when the British cut off the city’s port after the Boston Tea Party.
“It was quite early revolutionary sentiment,” said Ralph Buglass, a volunteer researcher for Montgomery History and the writer of the Montgomery History report.
Magruder went on to serve as a colonel in the Maryland militia during the Revolution. When Montgomery County was formed in 1776, Magruder organized its government with six others. He is considered a founding father of the county.
Like other influential county colonial figures, Magruder was an enslaver. When he was about 20 years old, he inherited 600 acres of land and “one Negro man and one Negro boy,” according to Buglass’s report. The 1790 Census is the last known census in which Magruder reported he enslaved 26 people before he died in 1811, Buglass said. Only 25 other county residents had as many or more people enslaved.
“The vast majority of the holdings were one or two people,” Buglass said in an interview. “When we’re talking about Magruder owning 26 … those were exceptions.”
Buglass added that at its height, about 4 in 10 of the county’s population were enslaved.Share this articleShare
Magruder’s family home, called “The Ridge,” is located on Muncaster Road about three miles north of where the high school in Derwood stands today. It is the only school in the United States to be named after Zadok Magruder, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. (Magruder Elementary in Williamsburg, Va., is named after Confederate Gen. John Bankhead Magruder.)
Derwood is a diverse community. At Magruder High School, the student body is 42 percent Hispanic/Latino, 21 percent White and 18 percent Black.
Montgomery school officials began reviewing all of their current school names to see if they were “appropriate candidates for school facilities” in 2019 while facing pressure to rename Lee Middle School, according to a memorandum from the school board.
A report by a committee of school system employees, Montgomery County historians and student researchers from the University of Maryland at Baltimore County found six schools were named after enslavers: Magruder, Thomas S. Wootton and Richard Montgomery high schools in Rockville; Montgomery Blair High and Francis Scott Key Middle schools in Silver Spring; and John Poole Middle School in Poolesville. Buglass has since identified one other school, Julius West Middle School in Rockville, making the total seven. The other six school communities haven’t started a name change process.
Mark Simonson, who is White and a parent of a junior at Magruder High, learned about Magruder’s history for the first time during an October 2022 Zoom session hosted by the school system. The session was scheduled to educate parents about the renaming process. Simonson recalled listening to Buglass speak and show the 1790 Census.
“It was just one of those things that really resonated with me,” said Simonson, 60. “The name is now synonymous to me as someone who enslaves others. … I thought, ‘I would like to pursue things to where Magruder High School is renamed as soon as possible.’”
Simonson worked with other parents to collect signatures for a petition to the board of education. He couldn’t recall the exact number of people who signed but estimated it was “a couple hundred.” There is some opposition to a name change, Simonson said, but attempts to reach objectors were unsuccessful.
Magruder is the only school to initiate the renaming process, said Frances Frost, an assistant to the associate superintendent for well-being, learning and achievement. Since the process began, there’s been “opinions from all across the board on how and whether to do this,” she said.
Some people are adamant the school name needs to change, she continued. Others want to leave it alone because it’s a part of the county’s history. And there’s another group who are okay with a name change on the condition that it still starts with the letter “M.”
The report to the school board will share the results from the survey and listening sessions, Frost said. It will also include estimates for costs on a school renaming. It won’t include suggested new names.
The board of education has sole authority on whether it should drop the school’s name. If it chooses to do so, that would start a separate process to find a new name.
By Nicole AsburyNicole Asbury is a local reporter for The Washington Post covering education and K-12 schools in Maryland. Twitter
If you ever saw the old movie “Fiddler on the Roof,” you know how warm and emotional Jewish families can be. They are always hugging, singing, dancing, laughing and crying together.
I come from another kind of Jewish family.
The culture of my upbringing could be summed up by the phrase “Think Yiddish, act British.” We were reserved, stiff-upper-lip types. I’m not saying I had a bad childhood; far from it. Home was a stimulating place for me growing up. At Thanksgiving, we talked about the history of Victorian funerary monuments and the evolutionary sources of lactose intolerance (I’m not kidding). There was love in our home. We just didn’t express it.
Whether it was nature or nurture, I grew into a person who was a bit detached. When I was 4, my nursery schoolteacher apparently told my parents, “David doesn’t always play with the other children. A lot of the time he stands off to the side and observes them,” which was good for a career in journalism but not for emotional availability or a joyous life.
If you had met me 10 years out of college, I think you would have found me a pleasant enough guy, cheerful, but a tad inhibited — somebody who was not easy to connect to. In truth, I was a practiced escape artist. If you revealed some vulnerable intimacy to me, I was good at making meaningful eye contact with your shoes and then excusing myself to keep a vitally important appointment with my dry cleaner.
Life has a way of tenderizing you, though. Becoming a father was an emotional revolution, of course. Later, I absorbed my share of the normal blows that any adult suffers — broken relationships, personal failures, the vulnerability that comes with getting older. The ensuing sense of my own frailty was good for me, introducing me to deeper, repressed parts of myself. I learned that living in a detached way is a withdrawal from life, an estrangement not just from other people but also from yourself.
I’m not an exceptional person, but I am a grower. I do have the ability to look at my shortcomings and then try to prod myself into becoming a more fully developed person.
I have learned something profound along the way. Being openhearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills. The real process of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete actions well: being curious about other people; disagreeing without poisoning relationships; revealing vulnerability at an appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.
People want to connect. Above almost any other need, human beings long to have another person look into their faces with love and acceptance. The issue is that we lack practical knowledge about how to give one another the attention we crave. Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life.
I see the results in the social clumsiness I encounter too frequently. I’ll be leaving a party or some gathering and I’ll realize: That whole time, nobody asked me a single question. I estimate that only 30 percent of the people in the world are good question askers. The rest are nice people, but they just don’t ask. I think it’s because they haven’t been taught to and so don’t display basic curiosity about others.
I see the results, too, in the epidemic of invisibility I encounter as a journalist. I often find myself interviewing people who tell me they feel unseen and disrespected: Black people feeling that the systemic inequities that afflict their daily experiences are not understood by whites, people who live in rural areas feeling they are overlooked by coastal elites, people across political divides staring at one another with angry incomprehension, depressed young people who feel misunderstood by their parents and everyone else, husbands and wives who realize that the person who should know them best actually has no clue about who they are.
So over the past four years I’ve been working on a book called “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.” I wanted it to be a practical book — so that I would learn these skills myself, and also, I hope, teach people how to understand others, how to make them feel respected, valued and understood.
I wanted to learn these skills for utilitarian reasons. If I’m going to work with someone, I don’t just want to see his superficial technical abilities. I want to understand him more deeply — to know whether he is calm in a crisis, comfortable with uncertainty or generous to colleagues.
I wanted to learn these skills for moral reasons. If I can shine positive attention on others, I can help them to blossom. If I see potential in others, they may come to see potential in themselves. True understanding is one of the most generous gifts any of us can give to another.
Finally, I wanted to learn these skills for reasons of national survival. We evolved to live with small bands of people like ourselves. Now we live in wonderfully diverse societies, but our social skills are inadequate for the divisions that exist. We live in a brutalizing time.
I’ve noticed along the way that some people are much better at seeing people than others are. In any collection of humans, there are diminishers and there are illuminators. Diminishers are so into themselves, they make others feel insignificant. They stereotype and label. If they learn one thing about you, they proceed to make a series of assumptions about who you must be.
Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people. They have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others. They know how to ask the right questions at the right times — so that they can see things, at least a bit, from another’s point of view. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, respected, lit up.
Illuminators are a joy to be around. A biographer of the novelist E.M. Forster wrote, “To speak with him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.” Imagine how good it would be to offer people that kind of hospitality.
Many years ago, patent lawyers at Bell Labs were trying to figure out why some employees were much more productive than others. They explored almost every possible explanation — educational background, position in the company — and came up empty. Then they noticed a quirk. Many of the most productive researchers were in the habit of having breakfast or lunch with an electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. Nyquist really listened to their challenges, got inside their heads, brought out the best in them. Nyquist, too, was an illuminator.
Here are some of the skills illuminators possess, the ones that are essential for seeing people well:
The gift of attention.
A few years ago, I was having a breakfast meeting in a diner in Waco, Texas, with a stern, imposing former teacher named LaRue Dorsey. I wanted to understand her efforts as a community builder because of my work with Weave, an organization I co-founded that addresses social isolation by supporting those who connect people. I was struck by her toughness, and I was a bit intimidated. Then a mutual friend named Jimmy Dorrell came into the diner, rushed up to our table, grabbed Mrs. Dorsey by the shoulders and beamed: “Mrs. Dorsey, you’re the best! You’re the best! I love you! I love you!”
I’ve never seen a person’s whole aspect transform so suddenly. The disciplinarian face Mrs. Dorsey had put on under my gaze vanished, and a joyous, delighted 9-year-old girl appeared. That’s the power of attention.
Each of us has a characteristic way of showing up in the world. A person who radiates warmth will bring out the glowing sides of the people he meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached. “Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: It creates, brings aspects of things into being.”
The first point of my story is that you should attend to people in the warm way Jimmy does and less in the reserved way that I used to do. But my deeper point is that Jimmy is a pastor. When Jimmy sees a person — any person — he is seeing a creature with infinite value and dignity, made in the image of God. He is seeing someone so important that Jesus was willing to die for that person.
You may be an atheist, an agnostic, a Christian, a Jew or something else, but casting this kind of reverential attention is an absolute precondition for seeing people well. When you offer a gaze that communicates respect, you are positively answering the questions people are unconsciously asking themselves when they meet you: “Am I a person to you? Am I a priority to you?” Those questions are answered by your eyes before they are answered by your words. Jimmy is a classic illuminator.
Accompaniment.
Ninety percent of waking life is going about your business. It’s a meeting at work, small talk while picking up your kids at school. Accompaniment is an other-centered way of being with people during the normal routines of life. We’re most familiar with the concept of accompaniment in music: The pianist accompanies the singer. He is in a supportive role, sensing where the singer is going, subtly working to help the singer shine.
If we are going to accompany someone well, we need to abandon the efficiency mind-set. We need to take our time and simply delight in another person’s way of being. I know a couple who treasure friends who are what they call “lingerable.” These are the sorts of people who are just great company, who turn conversation into a form of play and encourage you to be yourself. It’s a great talent, to be lingerable.
Other times, a good accompanist does nothing more than practice the art of presence, just being there. I had a student named Gillian Sawyer whose father died of pancreatic cancer. She was later the bridesmaid at a friend’s wedding. When it came time for the father-daughter dance, Gillian thought of her own dad and excused herself to go to the restroom to have a cry. As she emerged, she saw that all the people she’d been sitting near, many of whom were friends from college, were standing in the hallway by the bathroom door. She gave me permission to quote from a paper she wrote describing that moment: “What I will remember forever is that no one said a word. Each person, including newer boyfriends who I knew less well, gave me a reaffirming hug and headed back to their table. No one lingered or awkwardly tried to validate my grief. They were there for me, just for a moment, and it was exactly what I needed.”
The art of conversation.
If you want to know how the people around you see the world, you have to ask them. Here are a few tips I’ve collected from experts on how to become a better conversationalist:
Be a loud listener. When another person is talking, you want to be listening so actively you’re burning calories. I have a friend named Andy Crouch who listens as if he were a congregant in a charismatic church. He’s continually responding to my comments with encouraging affirmations, with “amen,” “aha” and “yes!” I love talking to that guy.
Storify whenever possible. I no longer ask people: What do you think about that? Instead, I ask: How did you come to believe that? That gets them talking about the people and experiences that shaped their values. People are much more revealing and personal when they are telling stories. And the conversation is going to be warmer and more fun.
Do the looping, especially with adolescents. People are not as clear as they think they are, and we’re not as good at listening as we think we are. If you tell me something important and then I paraphrase it back to you, what psychologists call “looping,” we can correct any misimpressions that may exist between us.
Turn your partner into a narrator. People don’t go into enough detail when they tell you a story. If you ask specific follow-up questions — Was your boss screaming or irritated when she said that to you? What was her tone of voice? — then they will revisit the moment in a more concrete way and tell a richer story.
Don’t be a topper. If somebody tells you he is having trouble with his teenager, don’t turn around and say: “I know exactly what you mean. I’m having incredible problems with my own Susan.” You may think you’re trying to build a shared connection, but what you are really doing is shifting attention back to yourself.
Big questions.
The quality of your conversations will depend on the quality of your questions. Kids are phenomenal at asking big, direct questions. I have a friend named Niobe Way who was one day teaching a class of eighth grade boys how to conduct interviews. She made herself their first interview subject and told them they could ask her anything. Here’s how it went:
Student A: Are you married? Niobe Way: No. Student B: Are you divorced? Way: Yes. Student C: Do you still love him? Way: [Deep gasp of breath] Student D: Does he know that you still love him? Does he know? Way: [Tears in her eyes] Student E: Do your children know?
As adults, we get more inhibited with our questions, if we even ask them at all. I’ve learned we’re generally too cautious. People are dying to tell you their stories. Very often, no one has ever asked about them.
So when I first meet people, I tend to ask them where they grew up. People are at their best when talking about their childhoods. Or I ask where they got their names. That gets them talking about their families and ethnic backgrounds. I once asked a group, “What’s your favorite unimportant thing about you?” I learned that a very impressive academic I know has a fixation on trashy reality TV.
After you’ve established trust with a person, it’s great to ask 30,000-foot questions, ones that lift people out of their daily vantage points and help them see themselves from above. These are questions like: What crossroads are you at? Most people are in the middle of some life transition; this question encourages them to step back and describe theirs. Other good questions include: If the next five years is a chapter in your life, what is the chapter about? Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in? And: What would you do if you weren’t afraid? Or: If you died today, what would you regret not doing?
Peter Block, who has written books about community, is great at coming up with questions: “What have you said yes to that you no longer really believe in?” “What is the no, or refusal, you keep postponing?” Or “What is the gift you currently hold in exile?,” meaning, what talent are you not using? Monica Guzman is a journalist who asks people: “Why you?” Why was it you who started that business? Why was it you who ran for school board? She wants to understand why a person felt the call of responsibility. She wants to understand motivation.
Recently at a dinner party I asked a question that would have sounded pretentious to me a decade ago: “How do your ancestors show up in your life?” But it led to a great conversation in which each of us talked about how we’d been formed by our family heritages and cultures. I’ve come to think of questioning as a moral practice. When you’re asking good questions, you’re adopting a posture of humility, and you’re honoring the other person.
Stand in their standpoint.
Whether I intend to or not, I walk into rooms carrying a lot of elite baggage — I write for elite publications. I used to teach at Yale. People on the left and the right may see me embedded in systems that they feel disrespect them or keep them down. There is often criticism, blame and disagreement in our conversations. I used to feel the temptation to get defensive, to say: “You don’t know everything I’m dealing with. You don’t know that I’m one of the good guys here.”
I’ve learned it’s best to resist this temptation. My first job in any conversation across difference or inequality is to stand in other people’s standpoint and fully understand how the world looks to them. I’ve found it’s best to ask other people three separate times and in three different ways about what they have just said. “I want to understand as much as possible. What am I missing here?”
In their book “Crucial Conversations,” Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler point out that every conversation takes place on two levels. The official conversation is represented by the words we are saying on whatever topic we are talking about. The actual conversations occur amid the ebb and flow of emotions that get transmitted as we talk. With every comment I am showing you respect or disrespect, making you feel a little safer or a little more threatened.
If we let fear and a sense of threat build our conversation, then very quickly our motivations will deteriorate. We won’t talk to understand but to pummel. Everything we say afterward will be injurious and hurtful and will make repairing the relationship in the future harder. If, on the other hand, I show persistent curiosity about your viewpoint, I show respect. And as the authors of “Crucial Conversations” observe, in any conversation, respect is like air. When it’s present nobody notices it, and when it’s absent it’s all anybody can think about.
We sometimes think that really great people perform the sorts of epic acts of altruism that might earn them Nobel Peace Prizes. But the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch argued that the essential moral skill is being considerate to others in the complex circumstances of everyday life. Morality is about how we interact with each other minute by minute.
My view of wisdom has changed over the years I’ve been working on this project. I used to think the wise person was a lofty sage who doled out life-altering advice in the manner of Yoda or Dumbledore or Solomon. But now I think the wise person’s essential gift is tender receptivity.
The illuminators offer the privilege of witness. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations and episodes we tell and see us in a noble struggle. They see the way we’re navigating the dialectics of life — intimacy versus independence, control versus freedom — and understand that our current selves are just where we are right now on our long continuum of growth.
The really good confidants — the people we go to when we are troubled — are more like coaches than philosopher kings. They take in your story, accept it, but prod you to clarify what it is you really want, or to name the baggage you left out of your clean tale. They’re not here to fix you; they are here simply to help you edit your story so that it’s more honest and accurate. They’re here to call you by name, as beloved. They see who you are becoming before you do and provide you with a reputation you can then go live into.
By now you’d think I’d be a regular Oprah, enveloping people in a warm beam of attention, encouraging them to be themselves. I’m not, and I don’t. I enter into a conversation vowing to be other-centered, then I have a glass of wine, and I start blabbing funny stories I know. My ego takes the wheel in ways I regret afterward. But there has been a comprehensive shift in my posture. I think I’m more approachable, vulnerable. I know more about human psychology than I used to. I have a long way to go, but I’m evidence that people can change, sometimes dramatically, even in middle and older age.
I’ll close with a final example of one group of people profoundly seeing one another. I came across it in Kathryn Schulz’s recent memoir, “Lost & Found.” Schulz’s dad, Isaac, was apparently a cheerful, talkative man. He was curious about everything and had something to say about everything — the novels of Edith Wharton, the infield fly rule in baseball, whether apple cobblers are better than apple crisps.
Isaac’s health gradually failed him during the last decade of his life, and then, toward the very end, he just stopped talking. One night, as he was fading toward death, his family gathered around him. “I had always regarded my family as close, so it was startling to realize how much closer we could get, how near we drew around his waning flame,” Schulz writes. That evening, the members of the family went around the room and took turns saying the things they didn’t want to leave unsaid. They each told Isaac what he had given to them and how honorably he had lived his life.
Schulz described the scene: “My father, mute but seemingly alert, looked from one face to the next as we spoke, his brown eyes shining with tears. I had always hated to see him cry, and seldom did, but for once, I was grateful. It gave me hope that, for what may have been the last time in his life, and perhaps the most important, he understood. If nothing else, I knew that everywhere he looked that evening, he found himself where he had always been with his family: the center of the circle, the source and subject of our abiding love.”
Our heartfelt thoughts are with our students and their families, who may be experiencing the impact of the deeply disturbing and tragic violence in Israel and Gaza in a variety of ways.
Our schools must be welcoming, safe, and secure places for all students. The resources below are intended to help students who may be experiencing trauma, anxiety, and stress as a result of these events. Additional resources have been shared with school and instructional leaders to leverage with their communities. Students and families may have ties to the region or may be subject to anxiety based on what they see in the news.
This tragic series of events may also come on top of emotions triggered by other recent events. This is a time to come together and support one another. As we lift one another up, there is no place for hate, bias, or bullying in our schools.
At any time, students can speak with a trusted adult to access counseling, mental health resources, or additional resources. Resources for Families
● How to Talk to Kids About Violence, Crime, and War: Common Sense Media gathers tips and conversation starters to help you talk to kids of different ages about the toughest topics.
● Resilience in a time of war: Tips for parents and teachers of teens: This article from the American Psychological Association can help adults guide their adolescent children beyond fear and to resilience.
● National Child Traumatic Stress NetworkProvides resources that can be filtered by topic or keyword and by audience with a focus on how adults can identify traumatic responses in young people and how to support them.
Posts by Paul Costello1
