Responsive Reads

Why We Can't Wait 

“Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait”…..When you are fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’ – then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.” Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King Jr.

Perhaps it is easy for those who have never struggled to read. Perhaps it is easy for those who know how to sit still, be quiet and listen all day. Perhaps it is easy for those who look, sound and act like the teacher. Unfortunately, too many students understand that “degenerating sense of nobodiness” on a daily basis.  Who are the students in our classrooms who experience that “nobodiness” regularly?

In this text, King explained the urgency felt by those who had endured enough. They had endured enough nobodiness. They had endured enough disrespect, humiliation, violence and despair. There are students that we see everyday who have endured enough. They have endured enough of being told everything that they have done wrong, but little of what they have done right. They have endured enough of not being told the rules to the game that they are losing. They have endured enough of “only” someone’s else story in the book and someone else’s picture on the wall.  We should feel an urgency to be responsive to those who have endured enough.

We are in a “We Can’t Wait” moment, right now. As protests rage on our streets, as the gap between the “haves” and the “have nots” grows ever wider, and the options for those ignored and underserved in our classrooms become even more invisible, we can’t wait.

We can’t wait to learn who are students are. We must take an interest in the skills and gifts that they bring to the classroom, especially those that we don’t usually value as “school appropriate” talents and gifts. We should not wait to learn the difference between cultural behaviors and misbehaviors. We cannot wait  to recognize our “first thought” before it becomes a deficit response, and we can not wait to validate and affirm through authentic texts so that EVERY student sees him or herself  when they open the book in class.

Responsive Reads is here because we can’t wait.