Talking with kids doesn't involve much talking (from adults)

This is post in an occasional series about lessons I've learned from more than a decade of working in middle and high schools. Other posts here, here, and here.

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Every so often someone asks me about switching careers to teaching. My first question is always the same: How do you feel about being around kids all day? 

My next question: No, really. Do you enjoy being around them? 

I find most people haven't thought hard about the sheer amount of time teacher spend with kid. Hell, thirteen years ago, I didn't think about it that way. I'm not sure I would've accepted my Teach for America placement in 2005 if I had. 

It wasn't that I thought I'd be bad at it. I thought I was cool enough (ha!), plus I liked being in front of people. There would be a learning curve, sure, but I'd figure it out. I did, eventually, but for none of the reasons above. 

In order to make it beyond the first year or so, I had to learn how to talk with kids — in my case, teenagers. You know, the developmental stage that combines narcissism, insecurity, ignorance, and emotional volatility. The one that many of us as adults try to forget or repress. 

Like teaching, people erroneously assume those who can built rapport with kids possess a gift and some people can do it effortlessly while others are doomed. There's some truth there, as a lucky few seem to have been born with the requisite combination of empathy, charisma, and wisdom that can elicit the best from the most angsty or angry kid. 

The rest of us have to work at it. 

The good news is that one of the rewards of working with teenagers is the opportunity to help them make better decisions and shape their lives and a more positive direction. (Makes up for the long hours and low pay.)

I'm not an expert and, in fact, I made a ton of mistakes. It's safe to assume that each of the following points came from hard-won experience. I hope I can spare you some of the same.

First, I learned to be a better listener. My conversational habits during my early-twenties were crap because I excelled at making every conversation about me. This doesn't go over well with anyone, but most peers were too polite to call me out. Teenagers weren't (and aren't) burdened by such niceties. There are few things teenagers are less interested in than the thoughts of adults.

Thanks to some wiser folks, I memorized the following phrases and applied as needed.

• “Say more.”
• “What is in your control?”
• “How do you think you should fix it?”
• “Who else will be affected?”
• “What is the ideal result for you?”
• “What have you learned from from this?”
• “If you had to do it again, what would you do differently?”
• “What do you want to change going forward?”
• “If you want to become your best self, what do you think you should do?”

Second, I discovered the subtle difference between affirming and agreeing. Teenagers say all sorts of crazy things, mostly because they are inexperienced at life. This is their first time through a breakup, a failed test, or peer rejection. Therefore, a lot of bad ideas are liable to come out (often alongside some, shall we say, poor linguistic choices.)

I initially would want to immediately correct those ideas, but my well-meaning advice would fall on deaf ears. What I realized is that a kid had to believe I heard them before they would listen to me. This took time and no small amount of smiling and saying phrases like, "I understand that you're upset."

Once they blew off steam, they were usually in a better place to reassess ideas like, "I'm going to repeatedly text (him/her) until they respond," or, "I'm going to punch (him/her) the next time I see (him/her)."

Third, I had to internalize the idea that I wasn't going to help kids by solving problems for them. This is hard to do in practice, primarily because this involves kids experiencing pain. If you have the slightest bit of empathy, you want to do everything possible to alleviate what they're going through. By doing that, though, you can create a dysfunctional cycle. Moreover, you deny a person the wisdom gained from addressing challenges and mistakes.

If anything, we want children to make mistakes while they're still in an environment where they have a support system that is stronger than anything they might have as an adult. They will be faced with tougher decisions when they are adults and the way to get practice making those decisions is by trying, failing, and trying again.

But it is hard to witness.

Finally, a cautionary note: be careful about what you promise. If you work with kids long enough, inevitably one will approach you and, before describing a problem, ask you to keep what he or she says a secret. This is where it's critical to both remember who the adult is and also take seriously the promises one makes to children.

This is how to thread the needle: Say something like, “I will listen to you very seriously. There are some things I cannot keep a secret because I also have to take your safety and the safety of others seriously. I don't want to make promises that I cannot keep. What I can promise to do is help you make the best decision."

The goal is to leave you space to ask for help and/or notify other adults who need to be brought in the loop.

A kid then may not want to tell you at the moment and that's OK. What I've found is that either the kid will eventually tell you or one of his or her friends will. If nothing else, you've left yourself room to go to another adult and say, "I'm worried about _________." School counselors are my go-to people for this. (I've even called the counselors for students who went to a different school than the one where I worked because because another student reported an alarming text message or social media post.)

This may upset a kid in the short term, but more than likely, that same kid will thank you later. What matters above all is their safety.

The rewards of working with kids aren't just the kinds featured in inspirational movie montages. Whether you're a teacher, coach, youth pastor, volunteer, or just a concerned adult, sometimes the best way we mentor is by making the difficult, ethical decision ourselves.

The thing about all kids is that they are always watching us — especially when they need help doing the right thing.

The price of things versus their cost

Manafort's mug shot, or, the look of a man who is starting to realize the depths of his losses

When we want to buy something, we usually know its price. The story of Paul Manafort shows we rarely realize the cost.

Manafort was an addict, though not in the traditional sense. Looking at the details of his case -- the clothes, houses, mistresses -- he was consumed by acquiring. Seeing the photo of his ostrich-skin jacket is akin to seeing a garbage can full of bottles outside an alcoholic’s house. 

(Yes, some of his spending was cover for money laundering. However, most of his smaller-ticket items -- the dozens of suits, shoes, and jackets -- reflect his spending preferences because they don’t hold resale value well. Also, the fact he bought stuff so he could buy more stuff speaks to his addiction to buying stuff.)

The infamous ostrich-skin jacket

Like most addictions, Manafort’s came at a far greater cost than the exorbitant sticker price of tacky clothes. For one, he’ll be in prison for, if not the rest of his life, the rest of it worth living. But while sad, jail time isn’t unheard of for high profile white collar criminals. People can bounce back from that sort of thing. 

The detail that struck me is how his daughter dealt with the consequences of her father’s crimes: she changed her last name.

Jessica Manafort, 36, filed to change her surname in Manhattan Supreme Court late Friday to "Jessica Bond," multiple reports showed Saturday. The independent filmmaker said she filed for the name change “to separate myself and my work from a public perception that has nothing to do with the person that I am.”

The last name Manafort will be associated with greed and corruption as long as Jessica Bond lives. In a move that matches her father's reputation for ruthlessness, she cut her losses. 

I could see Paul Manafort taking a calculated risk that his crimes could land him in jail. He may have thought some of his deals could've bankrupted him. Given the sketchy Russian oligarchs who paid him, I’ll bet he even weighed the risk of being killed. But having his child reject their shared name out of shame? I doubt Manafort figured that in as a potential cost of his actions. No one would. 

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Entire industries are premised on taking advantage of the difference between the price people will pay for a good versus the true cost of it. Economist Richard Thaler won a Nobel Prize for describing this, and similar, habits of thinking. The most expensive goods -- houses and cars -- are where this is most true. People spend their time negotiating the price down with the car dealer, but ignore the finance charges. We congratulate ourselves for negotiating down the price of the house, but don’t account for the enitre cost of the 30 year mortgage. 

(When I bought my first house, the mortgage salesman showed me the spreadsheet of all that I would pay over the 30 year life of the mortgage -- interest plus principal payments. In a moment of inadvertent admission, he said to me, “Those numbers are so huge, I just try not to look at them.” This was the person selling the mortgage.) 

But cost encompasses so much more than money. Every purchase takes up time, space, and attention. The real cost comes in to play when one factors in the two things we can't replace -- time and people. 

At its core, the story of Paul Manafort is the story of a life spent life in an endless search for more, then paying for it for with his relationships with his family and the time he can move freely on this earth. It is a parable of understanding what wanting something can really cost. 

That is, we are great knowing the price of something and terrible at knowing its cost. 

When should a partisan vote against party?

At what point do you vote against your preferred party?

I've been thinking a lot about this question, mostly because I hope several million Republicans will do so come November 6. 

So, in the spirit of intellectual honesty, I've thought about the times I haven't voted for the Democratic candidate. I've lived and voted in five states, so I've got a decent sample size. Here's what I've got:

- The Democrat is corrupt. In a House of Representatives election for a safe D seat, I voted against an incumbent that was under federal investigation for corruption.

- Voting even though there's not a plausible Democrat running for office. I will still vote in an election even when Democrats don't field a serious candidate. (I figure if someone cared enough to put her/his name on the ballot, I owe the courtesy of taking each office seriously.) One of my deal-breaker criteria is that whoever I cast my vote for should, at minimum, be able to handle the rigors of the office. The Basil Marceauxs of the world, sadly, don't quite make the cut. (He's a Republican, but plenty of nutters run on the D line, too. I just like this video.)

- The Democrat is an idiot. In one gubernatorial election, I had met both the Democratic and Republican candidates. I thought the Democratic candidate, while nominally a serious candidate, would've been a disaster if elected. In this case, the GOP candidate was a moderate and, more importantly, wasn't an idiot. Being governor matters more than most other offices in terms of being able to execute on basic, non-ideological governing functions. Therefore, I put a high priority on a candidate who is diligent, fair-minded, and competent. Ability to do the job matters more than ideology. 

Essentially, I'll vote for a Republican when there's clear corruption or incompetence. 

For Republicans who loathe Trump or just think he needs a more aggressive check on his power, what's your criteria for stepping away from the party line?

Bernie Madoff and a lack of imagination

'Cause this is a man that done stole more money than anybody else, we're talking about anybody else, one old man done took everybody. He done beat the record on everybody. He done went to the top of the list in criminality. Everybody is in there for money. The majority of the cases is about money, do you know what I mean? And here you got a man that done did it, done took it all. He's more important than Jesse James, you know what I mean? Bonnie and Clyde.   

The quote above comes from a man who was in prison with Bernie Madoff, the man behind a $60 billion Ponzi scheme -- the largest fraud in U.S. history. 

It's from Reveal's podcast "How Bernie Made Off: Are We Safe From the Next Ponzi Scheme?"  (Short answer: no). 

It's worth revisiting the Madoff scandal because it's not hard to see how it could be repeated -- and not just in the financial sector.

A couple facts stuck out to me about Madoff and his crimes:

- He was already wealthy before he started the Ponzi scheme. Not as wealthy as he would become, but he was worth plenty. He was also a former chair of NASDAQ. So why did he start the fraud? According to Madoff:

'Cause it feeds your ego. You say to yourself, "All right, all of a sudden, these banks which wouldn't give you the time of day, some of them all of a sudden, are willing to give you a billion dollars." I had all these major banks coming down, and entertaining me. It is a head trip.

- The scheme was simple. He employed a few people with high school educations, paid them enough money to put them in mansions, and they would spend their days scanning the stock quotes in the Wall Street Journal (dead tree version) and reverse engineer plausible trades. No actual trading happened -- he just paid older investors with new investors' money. Then he employed two programmers to write software that printed statements. That's it. 

- He was almost caught by both the feds and Wall Street firms. He fooled them, though, and it's worth examining why. 

First, the feds missed problems with Madoff's firm in part because he had a brand. He projected an image of being an old-school, trustworthy investor. Therefore, the Securities and Exchange Commission went soft on him. They sent newbie staff to investigate his firm. They missed basic stuff, like not knowing to check the amount of his cash holdings in the federal clearinghouse where money sits while both sides verify a trade. If they had a made a simple call, they would've realized his balance there was far, far below what it should've been for a firm worth tens of billions of dollars. 

The Wall Street banks ignored red flags with Madoff's operation because they took a cut on the money they steered to Madoff's firm. Therefore, they didn't want to check under the hood, so to speak. One major investor, a Spanish bank,  asked an employee, Rajiv Jaitly, to conduct due diligence. He wanted to do something simple: go to Madoff's firm and watch them execute a trade from beginning to end. Yet Madoff refused to let him do that. Was that a red flag for the Jaitly's bank? Far from it. Madoff called his bosses, who called Jaitly and told him to back off. 

When I then rang up to sort of see how it was going, he says, "Oh, no. No. We haven't done that." He said, "Look, Rajiv. We all know you're a difficult guy. We had to calm you down at that particular point, so we agreed to it. There's really no need to do it. We're all over this. We understand the investment strategy. It doesn't need this."

Jaitly resigned in protest. The fraud continued for several more years and the Spanish bank lost an undisclosed sum to Madoff's con.

In the end, what exposed Madoff was not the work of investigators, but the Great Recession and its massive losses. Madoff couldn't make the fake numbers work anymore, so he confessed to his sons, who then turned him in. 

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Bernie Madoff ran his scam for two decades in part because of a failure of imagination from those whose job it was to catch him. No one could picture someone with his stature committing fraud at this scale. Because they couldn't imagine it, they missed or intentionally overlooked obvious signs. 

What else are we lacking sufficient imagination to fully consider?