Patience and impatience

One of my favorite photos of my children shows the two of them sitting in the yard in small plastic chairs waiting for their friends to arrive. Looking nonchalant, Mason sits with his feet perched on a second chair, mimicking the grown-ups who use the footrest in our living room, and Emma lingers like a sentry on her morning rounds. At 4 and 6 years old, their worldview was still pretty narrow, but they had a sense of what it meant to wait patiently. As parents, we did our best to instill this value in our children — sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

Embracing the long, patient view of education is critical to our work at Poly. Spending 13 years with many of our students, we have an opportunity and a responsibility to shield them from the world of frantic judgment that plagues our public discourse and assumptions. Our faculty teach with a belief that deep understanding and mastery that requires perseverance will serve our students well. They grapple with the increasing complexity of what we ask of them, and understandably, some of them get frustrated when they don’t grasp a new idea or problem right away, and they may ask their teachers to just tell them the answer. Instead, we ask them to be patient, to persevere, and to believe, with time, that their effort will serve them well.

At the same time that we preach patience to our children, we also need to find ways to nourish their impatience. Last year a group of eighth-grade girls challenged us to reconsider the Middle School dress code. Steeped in tradition, the handbook had plenty of rules that seemed logical and appropriate, but in fact, it focussed on how girls should dress. In their brilliant presentation, they challenged us to see the faulty narrative that framed our policy by calling into question the idea that the girls should dress a certain way so the boys wouldn’t behave badly. Their impatience with our underlying assumptions demanded that we reconsider and reframe the logic (or illogic) of our handbook. And we did.

The process we went through last year to reconsider the Middle School dress code was a perfect example of the importance of our students’ willingness to be impatient with us. Ultimately we want our students to aspire to solve the most intractable problems facing our country and the world. Without a profound understanding of the motivating power of impatience, they might never ask why. Patience is a virtue, as my mother reminded me often. We should teach it, model it, and sing its praises. And yet, apathy and contentment lurk at the edge of where patience becomes too comfortable, so we should also cultivate and celebrate the intellectual curiosity and sense of justice that can be fueled by impatience.

JWB