Opening Convocation 2026: How to Listen to a Story

Welcome to the 2026-2027 School year. 

Each year, our administration reflects on our mission and guiding principles, on societal influences or periods of time, and on our reactionsand responses to the world. This year focuses on a period in our country as we embrace its 250 years of independence; over the summer, the senior level educators have reflected on the theme 250 Years: Many Voices. Building Community. 

In thinking about how I might help frame this theme for everyone, I am sharing my thoughts on the topic entitled: “How to Listen to a Story.”  

Think of the last time someone told you a story that influenced your relationship. Maybe it was a grandparent, telling you something you did not fully understand until years later. Maybe it was a classmate, saying something in passing that landed differently once you knew their history. Being a good listener and hearing what people have to say builds something authentic between people.

This year, 2026, marks 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The history of the United States is thousands of overlapping stories, many never written down, many told by people no one asked, and many still waiting to be heard. Our theme, “Many Voices, Building Community," claims this country is built by people learning, sometimes slowly and sometimes painfully, to hear each other's different stories.

Today you'll hear four remarks. They will answer the questions: Who tells a story? Who's been left out of it? And what stories have shaped us? To launch this effort, I want to focus on the fundamentals of listening and on some finer points of listening as it applies to three specific forms of storytelling.

Storytelling only works if there is a listener. As I am sure you know, listening is a skill, and this skill is helped by understanding how a story is told. There's a difference between hearing and listening. 

I remember when my 4-year-old was exhibiting what appeared to be a hearing problem. We went for a hearing test. After a few minutes doing the screening, the doctor turned to me and said, “your child hears just fine; they just don’t listen.” A bit embarrassed, I left the office with a new perspective!

Listening is a choice. It takes effort, and you can get better at it. The same way you get better at writing. It helps to know that stories are told using a variety of devices or forms. Different forms of storytelling ask different things of a listener. A story told about someone is different than listening to a story told by someone. Some stories are told to move you to a desired conclusion. Some simply seek to stimulate thought or expose an unseen truth.

While story telling takes on many stylistic differences or forms, there is always a relationship between the writer and the audience. Knowing the form, might help you understand what the story intends.

I want to present three ways of listening, one for each of three forms that are used to tell stories: biography, memoir, and rhetorical essay.

A biography is someone else telling a person's story, usually with hindsight that the subject of the story did not have while living it. The biographer has done the research, and they have looked at the whole arc and made choices about what matters. When reading or listening to this form, you are asked to pay attention to the context.

You might ask: What forces shaped this person? What history, community, and constraints did they work within? And you're always asking: who chose to tell this story, and how did that choice influence what is included and what is left out?

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, David Herbert Donald, wrote "Lincoln." Donald set out to judge each of Lincoln's choices only by what Lincoln himself could have known at the time, not by how the Civil War turned out. That rule forces you to see Lincoln as a self-taught lawyer from the Illinois frontier, boxed in by a fractured party and a cabinet full of rivals, and facing a war whose outcome was never certain. Read that way, Lincoln looks like a man making decisions inside real constraints. When you read the rather long biography, you have the context that shaped him while he was still living it.

A memoir is written using the first-person. Someone is telling you their own story, in their own words, from memory. That's a different point of view. They are not presenting you with research. They are giving you their experience or their perspective. And memory, as you know, is not a transcript. It's partial. It is shaped by feeling as much as fact.

Listening to a memoir means listening for trust. This person is handing you their memory and asking you to hold it carefully. Your job is not to fact-check them. It's to take seriously the truth of what they experienced, even knowing it may be partial.

Many of you have read Tara Westover's memoir "Educated." She grew up in rural Idaho in a family that kept her out of school entirely until she was seventeen, then she went on to earn a PhD from Cambridge. Westover keeps admitting the limits of her own memory. In places, she adds a note where a sibling remembers the same event differently. She is telling you upfront that it's partial. The memoir asks a listener to take the account seriously as her experience, without expecting it to double as testimony.

The third form I want to frame for you is the rhetorical essay. Rhetorical essays are trying to inform you and move you. The writer wants you to feel something, believe something, or do something, and has made choices about structure, evidence, and language to get you there.

Listening to rhetorical work means listening for purpose. You might ask: What does this person want me to walk away thinking? Whose interest does this argument serve? George Orwell’s rhetorical essay "Politics and the English Language" exposes rhetorical bias exceptionally well. He argues that vague, worn-out language is not just bad writing. People use it as a tool. He asserts that, "political speech and writing are largely thedefense of the indefensible." A fuzzy phrase or “double speak” as he defines it, lets people avoid saying what they mean, which makes it easier to believe things that would be incredible in plain words. If you listen carefully, you will find this technique being used in a variety of political speeches.

In another one of his famous essays, "Shooting an Elephant," he uses a straightforward rhetorical technique. The story is personal. To expose how power traps people, he tells about a colonial officer forced to kill an animal he has no reason to kill. Both essays are built to move you toward a specific conclusion about language and power. This kind of listening matters when we read about the people history has ignored or silenced. This summer, the faculty was offered the collection of essays called “Who Is Government: The Untold Story of Public Service.” The author and editor Michael Lewis pulls together a range of essays that tell different stories about people who shaped various parts of our country. My favorite one was about the man who found the reason for so many mines collapsing and saved the lives of hundreds of people. These essays use untold stories of heroes in government service to motivate future generations into government.

When you read a story, ask if you should listen for context, listen for trust, or listen for purpose. Listening is a discipline of hearing someone else's story on their own terms, without filtering it through what you already believe or without waiting for the part that applies to you.

Most of the people who lived through this country's 250 years of history can no longer speak for themselves. They reach us only through what was recorded, what is remembered, or, for those who left no written record at all, what we can carefully infer from what they left behind. Listening across that gap takes the same effort as listening to the person sitting next to you. It doesn't happen automatically. A community, and a country, is built by everyone willing to listen to a story that isn't theirs.

As you listen today, I hope you will ask yourself: Am I just hearing this, or am I listening?

Let's start with the first question of the day: Who tells a story.