This is my fourth piece exploring what it means to lead with love. See the other pieces at the links below:
#1: learning love: a beginning
#2: what does it mean to be love?
#3: how do we lead with love through our mistake?
What is wrong with urgency? What is beautiful about patience?
When I think about what it means to live a fulfilled and healthy life, my list includes:
- Purpose
- Contemplation
- Integrity
- Curiosity and cognitive struggle
- Creativity and play
- Connection
- Movement
- Nourishment
Everything that makes up a complete and fulfilled life takes time to build. But both for our teachers and for our students, we often don’t budget for the time we need.
Look at my list above: is there anything that you would add? Anything that doesn’t have a place in your vision of a life or of a school? This essay’s title is about urgency and patience because in my work I have often seen urgency undercut our ability to build spaces with every single one of these components. Urgency makes it hard to wait for students to experience struggle, to ensure that contemplation is authentic rather than rote, to protect space for the identity development students need in service of their unique senses of purpose and integrity.
What this doesn’t mean: I am not saying that issues of equity and justice in education are not urgent and pressing – they absolutely are. The fire that keeps us moving forward in our work as educators is essential. What I am speaking to is how to honor the urgency we feel in our hearts and guts while calming the spastic yo-yo that sometimes occupies our minds.
Many folks have written about slowing down in ways that have recently moved me, inspired me, or created a feeling of connection in an otherwise speed-obsessed world. Below, I include an annotated list of resources that have deepened my engagement with the idea of slowing down:
- Aishwarya on waiting: I love that this essay dives into the multiple possible solutions to one student’s spelling mistake. In getting into the nitty gritty of the ‘o’ in people, for example, Aishwarya models that urgency can mean we move past effective techniques that solve problems in our rush. In sticking to global but “unuseful” explanations like “sound it out” or “I don’t know. That’s how it is,” we end up actually wasting time. In this way, patience to me is also paying attention, which is essential when we’re working with young people.
- In Becoming an Everyday Changemaker, Alex Venet dedicates an entire chapter to slowing down. She starts with comparting creating equity-centered change to driving over speed bumps near her home: “In change, as on my street [re: speed bumps], slowing down doesn’t stop us from reaching our destination; it just helps us (and everyone in our community) make it there whole.” (p. 127) Importantly, she acknowledges that there are different kinds of slowing down – “Sometimes, equity-resistant educators say we must slow down as a way to avoid the need for change and uphold the status quo. Paul Gorski (2019) calls ‘pacing for privilege,’ an ‘equity detour’ that prioritizes the comfort and interests of people who have the least interest in that progress’ (p.57)” (p. 127) “This isn’t the type of slowing down I’m encouraging.” (p. 127). And finally, Venet describes another cost of urgency that I see in my work all the time. “Above all, slowing down allows us to step out of ‘survivor’ mode and actually feel and be. In an equity-centered trauma-informed vision of school, I dream of educational spaces where students and teachers are not required to hide away their emotions, push past grief and pain, or ‘leave their baggage at the door.’ In spaces where equity, justice, and healing are centered, we can bring our full selves. All our emotions. All our experiences. All our strengths and challenges. When we rush, we often push our feelings down just to get through the day. Slowing down during change gives us a chance to really feel our feelings.” (p.146).
- Shawn Ginwright, in his book The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves, has two chapters that I think each capture something really beautiful about urgency and patience. Ginwright’s chapter on flow, like Alex Venet’s writing quoted above, pauses to acknowledge that the work is urgent. He says “You may be saying that there’s critical work to do now that requires immediate and swift action. This is true, but if we are not aware of our frenzied work for justice, we might believe that we are building a new house when actually we are just putting out the fire in one,” (p. 211). In his chapter on rest, Ginwright reviews research on sleep equity and then insists that all of us “have to build a practice where we prioritize rest, not as an act of self-indulgence or self-care, but rather as a critical component of our journey toward justice. This is why we have to understand rest as a right, not a privilege for those who can get and enjoy it,” (p. 227).
- Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance is perhaps the most fiercely worded manifesto on rest. I’ll admit that I often found her framing quite challenging – the extent to which she frames rest as social justice work and grind culture a product and tool of capitalism was hard for me to read, consider, or accept. But there are some moments where Hersey articulated something in a way I couldn’t ignore, or with a quote from a thinker that stayed with me, or with an example that really highlighted the relevance of her argument to my everyday work. I particularly loved her exhortation that a big part of our work with young people has to be to nurture their imagination, because only then can we push for a future that is transformational and liberatory. The idea that imagination, rest, and radical social justice work are interrelated and interdependent is an idea that I first encountered in Hersey’s work and has stayed with me since.
- Tema Okun’s “White Supremacy Culture” has really impacted me personally as a reflection tool and has served as an invitation to question what I consider ‘normal.’ There is a lot of loud and influential criticism of Okun’s list, and the last time I shared Okun’s list on social media, I got extremely angry DMs. I’ve read some of this criticism and Okun’s own responses to them and find much of the conversation interesting and thoughtful, even when the writers have differing stances. As with any tool, I think this list can and has been misused in the name of less accountability at the cost of the very folks we are trying to protect. I continue to use Okun’s list to ensure I am being inclusive and considerate and mindful with folks I work with, a reflection that has most definitely made me a better educator.
As a type-A person raised very much in an achievement-focused world, I have always believed that I have a responsibility to be the best as a teacher and as an educator because that is who our children deserve. I used to have a poster up on my apartment door that said “today, my children will receive an excellent educator,” and saw that as a useful reminder to repeat every day before I walked out the door to school. And, crucially, I very much equated “best” with “fastest.” In a lot of parts of my work, I unconsciously still do.
The idea of slowing down continues to be one of the scariest and most challenging ideas I have ever encountered in my journey through ideas of equity, inclusion, and justice. The reflection questions below are meant as an invitation to think about ways the titular question might show up in your own practice.
- What is something that you are trying to get better at right now? Are you putting the pressure of urgency on yourself as you work on it? What does that feel like? What would it feel like if instead of that urgency, you told yourself that ‘it takes the time it takes’? What would that feel like?
- If you are being patient with yourself, what does that feel like? What does it enable in your learning journey? What might it feel like if you added some urgency to it?
- What is a scenario for you where urgency vs. patient feels the most complex/fraught?
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