“Don’t be patient. Don’t ever be. This is the way a new world begins.”
When I read this quote near the conclusion of N.K. Jemisin’s amazing Broken Earth trilogy this year, it spoke to me: Yes, change happens when we’re not static, complacent, or passive. And sometimes that requires a certain relentlessness that can be…a bit much.
Essun, the main character in Jemisin’s science fiction/fantasy epic, is unforgivingly relentless in her pursuit of a new world that recognizes her humanity and the humanity of others previously dehumanized in her world. She’s not diplomatic, gentle, or patient. She’s driven, and her admonition to resist the genteel passivity of traditional notions of patience speaks to me as I think about my own desire to pursue change in education. We can’t wait for things to change, be patient with traditional and entrenched systems of inequity, or passively accept the many dehumanizing forces in our schools today, from standardized tests to technocratic, behaviorist lesson plans to the stultifying assembly line of the 8-period day.
The fact that Essun’s crusade against patience speaks to me in my gut also speaks to why some people might find me to be too pushy, intense, impertinent, impatient, and/or self-righteous as I (attempt to) collaborate for change. I don’t want to wait until people are ready. I don’t want to praise small steps. I want to work relentlessly toward a new vision of what education can be. Essun was not the Miss Congeniality of her world, and though I certainly try to be diplomatic, I also feel a simmering frustration in my bones that makes me wish I had Essun’s other-worldly ability to tap into the seismic power of the earth and just move things on my own.
Bristling against patience
Yes, I know I’m aligning myself with a science fiction hero and painting my school change goals in epic proportions. And I also hear the presumption in my connection with Essun (and her genius creator, Jemisin), especially since Essun is both a woman of color and a member of the marginalized orogene people (people who can use their energy to create seismic shifts). As a White middle class woman (who has no special seismic powers that make her outcast:), I understand that my work for justice must always focus on intentionally following leaders in historically marginalized groups, and I don’t want to overstate my similarities with Essun here. But still, literary connections like these help me understand myself, my emotions, and my relationships in the most human of terms. While Essun has been battling the end of the world and the creation of a new one, I’ve been mucking my way through a school year in which my primary goal seemed to be to understand the new educational world I had found myself working in.
New, because: pandemic. Because: racial reckoning. Because: new job. Because: new district. Because: new colleagues. Because: working in person again. Because: new perspectives from new research, degree, and experiences in academia.
One of my new (and newly cherished) colleagues has helped me do a lot of reflecting this year about how to be who I am and pursue change in this new educational landscape, but also to dig in, put down roots, build relationships, and find ways to share and collaborate that honor my team members’ humanity and the journeys they are on. She is always telling me to focus on my “sphere of influence,” and focus on the things that I can do, rather than the enormity of the systems that I can’t change.
I know that this is good, sound, logical advice. I can’t shift the larger forces of education that created and sustain a standards-worshipping, teacher-centered, content-centered, factory-minded educational system built in the image of all the overlapping dominant ideologies and identity groups that have benefitted from those systems. On any given day, I can only focus on taking sure and steady steps toward humanizing change within my job description and with direct collaborators.
But. To my impatient, change-focused, Essun-channeling self, this sounds a lot like telling me to be patient. To wait. To put myself in a box and be content with incremental change that doesn’t shift the biggest boulders. To engage in what Paul Gorski calls “pacing for privilege,” the practice of catering to the hesitance of the privileged while punishing those who most ready for and in need of change. To continue to participate in an educational system that does harm through omission, blindness, and misguided tradition.
If I give in to this kind of facile notion of patience, I will be guilty of the kind of “academic death” that Ladson-Billings describes as the result of stagnancy in educational practice:
“For if we ever get to a place of complete certainty and assuredness about our practice, we will stop growing. If we stop growing we will die, and more importantly, our students will wither and die in our presence. Both teachers and students can be vulnerable to a sort of classroom death. Death in the classroom refers to teachers who stop trying to reach each and every student or teachers who succumb to rules and regulations that are dehumanizing and result in de-skilling (Apple 1993). Instead of teaching, such people become mere functionaries of a system that has no intent on preparing students—particularly urban students of color—for meaningful work and dynamic participation in a democracy. The academic death of students is made evident in the disengagement, academic failure, dropout, suspension, and expulsion that have become an all-too familiar part of schooling in urban schools.”
Gloria Ladson-Billings, 2014, p. 77
“Culturally Relevant Pedagogy 2.0 a.k.a. the remix”, Harvard Educational Review
Collaborating for mindful patience, like water
I know that my Whiteness and my relative power in the educational system can make it comfortable for me to wait, to go slow, to defer to the comfort of other White people around me, and I want to be constantly vigilant against the kind of complacent patience and stagnancy that Ladson-Billings rightly points to as a killing force in our schools.
And I can learn from Essun, who was ready to take on the world alone, convicted by her righteousness and shut her off from others’ strengths and perspectives. It took her three books and hundreds of pages to truly build relationships for to collaborate for change, and she literally blew things up when she pushed too hard, in solitary action. So I’m learning from her, and from my wise-but-frustrating colleague who reminds me of the power of focusing on my own locus of change.
Enter new framing of patience, which I read about in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. In Atwood’s novel retelling of The Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective, Penelope’s water nymph mother reminds her of the subtle power that water gives her:
“Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.”
Margaret Atwood. The Penelopiad
Yes. This is a patience I can get behind. It’s active, not passive. It has a goal, and it is relentless. It is creative. It is welcoming, life-giving even, and it never stops in pursuit of its goal. And moreover, water is everywhere, and streams come together to wear the path forward. One drop of water, one stream makes a small change, over time. But water pools and builds strength through connection and coordinated movement.
This is all jiving with what I’m learning about mindfulness, as well (more on that in another post, perhaps). Patience is not about sitting around, waiting for things to happen: it’s about intentional action that is thoughtful and comes from a broader perspective on the context—not about forcing things to go a certain way on a certain timeline. All this is to say that I still love Jemisin’s quote, and I will live by her rejection of the passive, complacent patience that she scorns when she says, “Don’t be patient. Don’t ever be. This is the way a new world begins.”
But I will also learn from Essun, her hero who learned to work with others, to take a broader view beyond blowing things up in response to her own urgent vision. l work harder to be patient like water: always moving, connecting, and creatively moving forward over time.
Kate Lechtenberg, PhD 