We’re halfway through “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler, and we’ve arrived at a crucial turning point in the plot. The main character, Lauren Olamina, loses her family and home to an arson attack. I wanted my students to fully experience the severity of this loss, so instead of continuing with a workshop model I’d been using throughout the unit thus far, I decided to read to the class:

I sat where I was for three weary, terrifying hours. Nothing happened to me, but I could see and hear things happening. There were people moving around the hills, sometimes silhouetting themselves against the sky as they ran or walked over the hills…I heard a lot of gunfire--individual shots and short bursts of automatic weapons fire…

“Why are we reading this?” a student interrupts. The class remains quiet. I look up to see most resting their hands against their heads. They look bored and glance up at me with their faces downcast. I see some of them begin to turn their phones over, and others reach into their pockets.

“Because it’s important. This world isn’t that far off from ours,” I say.

Another student responds, “But it’s not that bad.”

“But what if one day it is?” I ask. “Don’t you think that matters to you?”

Another student shrugs. Another stares at me blankly.

Parable of the Sower was written in 1993, yet some would argue Butler’s predictions are bone-chillingly accurate. Unfortunately, none of that matters if the only thing students want to do is go back to their phones.

For many of my students, reading is not a precursor to revolutionary action, but a cumbersome task that is always a preamble to another tedious assessment. Even if this is the case, reading has been shown to be a tool for building empathy. Empathy is how we learn to care for people we will never meet. In this case, the expediency of technology has created a sense of immediate gratification that stands opposite to the empathy that reading can cultivate.

When I talk to my coworkers about the apathy I notice in my classroom, we realize that the large chunks of writing, the big words and the complexity of Butler’s ideas are all turnoffs for our students. When students are simply met with a page that has a lot of words on it, disinterest is immediate.

I recognize it is not my place to mirror their complacency but to model what it would look like to care. But how do I get them to care when I can’t even get them to see the value of a book that clearly shows us the effects of our collective negligence? It’s impossible to reach this empathy that reading can provide without first helping students gain tools to build the mental and emotional stamina to engage with complex texts.

Building Boredom and Executive Functioning

While people are not yet roaming the streets en masse scavenging for food and water, around the world, people are doing just that as I write this. In our country, our democracy is at stake as well. Despite all this, Generation Alpha cares less and less.

Lately, it appears that students are more interested in rapidly scrolling through their friends’ stories, checking their likes and direct messages and uploading stories with filters on social media apps. Their impulses are wired to do this and, in my opinion, focus too much on the self, the immediacy of tasks and the imminent gratification from likes — it does not allow students to sit deeply and meaningfully in someone else’s emotions and experiences.

Students will reach for their phones during transitions, in between reading passages, whole-group discussions and during moments of boredom. While taking phones away is a first step, this doesn’t address the problem — the immediate withdrawal in front of a dense, complex text. Reversing these trends requires students to lean into the practice of boredom.

Boredom, despite the negative connotations, is a discipline that frees the mind from the perceived need for constant activity, and research shows that doing nothing can lead to inspiration, imagination and presence. Boredom is a feeling that students need to learn to befriend to tackle a complex text — because being bored should not be a reason to miss out on a thought-provoking reading experience, such as the one “Parable of the Sower” provides.

Boredom should be practiced daily and explicitly in classrooms. Set a timer and just sit there with your students. Put phones away and leave nothing on the desk. Sit there. Do nothing. This trains the mind to refuse any impulses and reach for distractions from the present moment.

In my classroom, I’ve implemented sustained silent reading (SSR) with no comprehension assessments to build reading stamina and help students find a genuine love for reading. Like boredom, this practice also requires silence and presence. Although a student’s mind might wander during this time, the expectation that they are silent and interfacing with words demands self-regulation.

Boredom and SSR are also connected to executive functioning because they demand that students be present, focused and control their impulses. When students are only allowed to sit in class and think about their thoughts or look at a book, it is a necessary first step to reading dense texts because reading requires focus. With time, the impulse to pull out a phone or withdraw from difficult tasks will hopefully be mitigated when students have learned that being bored or still is not such a bad thing.

Going Down Reading

To be honest, on most days, I feel helpless. Even when phones are away, the disconnect remains. And in a sense, the disconnect is incredibly valid: despite all the activism, there is little change that students can cling to. If a young person is looking at the gaps between social movements and the continued fracturing of our world, it makes sense to give up and focus on the self.

Some of my solutions have been to couple parts of “Parable of the Sower” with current and local events. In the Bay Area, poverty rates are extremely high with the soaring cost of living. In San Francisco, homelessness has long been a crisis. The wealth gap is immense and we’ve seen the effects of climate change with extreme heat in parts of the Bay. Through my efforts, I have gotten students to see the correlations between these harsh realities and the circumstances of Lauren’s world. But even then, the apathy remains.

“What’s the point? The world is going to end anyway,” they tell me.

And if it were true that the world would end, there would still be a period after the collapse of society where all we’ll have left is each other. Then, it’ll come down to empathy and community. When Lauren finally succeeds at building her community, she tells them:

...If we’re willing to work, our chances are good here. I’ve got some seed in my pack…What we have to do at this point is more like gardening than farming. Everything will have to be done by hand--composting, watering, weeding, picking worms or slugs…We work together, we can defend ourselves, and we can protect the kids. A community’s first responsibility is to protect its children--the ones we have now and the one we will have…

Although the work of building community is daunting, as Lauren says, we must protect our children. They will bear the brunt of a broken world. We protect them by empowering them with the tools needed to survive. Empathy is the tool for survival in a world shaped by individualism, but empathy cannot be practiced with poor impulse control. Empathy requires discipline, and discipline comes from facing and befriending discomfort.

In my ideal classroom, students are present, reading the words and forming connections with themselves and the world. They push themselves to engage with dense paragraphs. They annotate. They may struggle, but they appreciate the long process of learning and understanding. They walk away thinking about the world with expanded horizons because they’ve just experienced a life that is not theirs. But the presence that leads to this empathy will only come if a student is self-regulated enough to manage the impulses that create disengagement. If a student thinks all answers should come immediately from a single tool in their hand — their phones — disengagement is inevitable.

But I know that as long as I am in the classroom, my duty as a teacher is to model care and empathy, regardless of my frustrations. I am still comforted by that one student who will see the value of reading a novel that tells us who we will become if we forget about each other, for if we do not have each other, we have nothing.

During my first two years of teaching, I dealt with many situations that left me feeling downtrodden, broken and totally drained. For example, one day, I was sitting in my classroom in full panic mode as I tried to figure out how to create a graphic organizer for my students’ first essay. When an idea finally crossed my mind, and as I was about to write down my thoughts, a student stormed in and refused to leave. The more I told them they had to leave and head back to their class, the more their voice rose as they declared they, “hate their teacher.”

Another incident that I remember was when students came into my class at a time when I didn’t teach them. When these students arrived, they told me this teacher “sucks” and how mean that teacher was to them. Later, I saw a message from that same teacher whose class they had left saying, “______ are on their way to your class.”

The common denominator in each of these situations is that every student who came to me was a student of color. The demographics at this school were approximately 60 percent Latino, 20 percent Pacific Islander and 20 percent Black. All the teachers they were trying to avoid were white.

Over the course of my first year back from the “Zoom Year,” the pattern became clear to me: Students of color did not feel safe with their white teachers. All of these teachers — and I mean all — seemed more invested in shirking the responsibility of supporting these students onto the teachers these students felt safer around instead of figuring out how to become the safe space these students needed. This harmed me as much as the students.

White teachers have been avoiding the work of loving students of color for so long, and when that work disproportionately falls on teachers of color, they are more likely to leave education, creating a less diverse workplace that increasingly denies students accurate reflections of themselves.

People like myself deserve safe schools so we can last in this profession and be the best versions of ourselves in service of our students, and this is what I want white teachers to do in order for us teachers of color to thrive in this profession.

Seek Consent

When that teacher messaged me about their students, I would have loved it if they'd waited until I responded so I could ask, “Why?” What I would have loved here is consent, an ardent agreement between both of us that this student can come into my space. I would have loved transparency on the part of that teacher.

In my classroom, I treat students as humans first, not obstacles to classroom management. I am clear and honest when I know I am wrong, and I say sorry. What if, instead, I was given an opportunity to share my approach to student relationships with that teacher so they could work on their practice? What if that teacher, the student in question and I sat down together and had a consensual conversation with the student to better understand their needs? What had they done or said in their classroom that day that made this student feel unsafe? I would have felt like my autonomy and humanity were being honored because I would get to advocate for not only the student but myself.

This would require a school culture rooted in these kinds of consensual conversations, from consent over a quick hallway conversation to consent to unpack and work through the most egregious harm. Consent would have to be introduced and studied beyond the typical conversations about health and integrated into every aspect of our social interactions with each other as professionals.

Build Empathy

No one is going to get it right all the time in education. Even when we share the same identities as students, every single one of us will let many students down over the course of our time as educators. We will also let each other down, but we are in the work of being openly human all the time, and that’s okay. What matters most is how much empathy we have when we’re faced with the impact of our actions.

I want white teachers to treat me as a human being and to remember that I am just as tired as they are, if not more. I want white teachers to know I am also struggling to figure out how to help our students with the highest needs.

I remember one time I had a student who watched a neighbor get shot and killed over winter break. I was heartbroken for the student, whose return to school after the incident was incredibly rocky; his externalizing behaviors were disruptive and supporting him required the help of multiple adults. I did not know how to help a lot of the time, and yet, white teachers would let him walk out of his classroom to me as if I had more answers than they did. All I did was remember that he had been through a lot when I talked to him.

In all the situations where white teachers have pushed their work on me, what hurt the most was I genuinely felt they had no empathy for me. Had they ever wondered what it would be like for me, a first-year teacher of color, to take on so much when I was still trying to figure this job out — when I was also deeply hurting for my students experiencing trauma — the same way mine was at their age?

This would require a school culture where regular perspective-taking is happening so we can understand each other. In building this school culture, I reflect on the following questions:

• What factors did I neglect to consider when I committed this harm?
• What might this person be experiencing that I can’t understand because of my identity?
• What is this experience teaching me about myself right now?

This, too, requires a culture of empathy and acceptance of our humanity.

Show Humility

Finally, I want white teachers to say sorry. So many white teachers are so invested in their image of being “nice” in an attempt to field off their power that they forget our humanity. Their focus on overcompensating for their power by being polite results in a disproportionate emphasis on their self-image as opposed to the impact of their actions. I believe this misplaced energy results in a loss of humanity as they consequently cannot be present and empathetic enough to acknowledge the impact of their negligence.

I want white teachers to admit this to themselves. Instead of denying their power, I want them to recognize its enormity. I want them to sit with this power, to admit to themselves that they did not leverage it in an empathetic manner and, as a result, caused extraordinary harm. Then, I want them to apologize for all the harm they’ve caused. Specifically, I would want their sorry to sound like this:

“I was racist. I pushed this student on to you because I didn’t and still don’t know how to support them. I wasn’t thinking about how hard this would be for you. I am ready to do the work to regain their trust and yours. How can I do that?”

I believe this would require a top-down culture where the administration is the first to model this level of humility during staff-wide meetings and one-on-one interactions. We need to see leadership where humility is modeled and expected from every staff member.

Building a Future for Teachers of Color

How much can I really take on? I reckon with this every day because the reality is that if I care about students of color, I have to be willing to encourage the betterment of all the people they interface with, including my white counterparts. Knowing this, I want to offer what I’ve seen work with white teachers who haven’t made me feel small or dehumanized.

I’ve seen regular meetings for white teachers in affinity spaces to work on their racial identities. I’ve seen teachers who have successfully created self-sufficient classrooms and can afford to step outside with one student and have authentic restorative conversations when harm is caused. I’ve seen white teachers who recognize their racial power by positioning themselves between security and students when conflicts escalate.

I’ve also had white teachers who have recognized the imbalance of responsibilities placed on me and the power they hold compared to me. They’ve used that power to advocate for me with admin and colleagues. This has made me feel seen and has allowed me to preserve my energy for my students as opposed to defending myself against coworkers.

In all these situations, my white colleagues did not pretend to have less power than they had. In fact, they recognized it and leveraged this power so the work of loving and supporting our students in all their humanity is as equitably distributed as possible.

Because of all these positive experiences, I know it is possible — with consent, humility and empathy — to create a dynamic between teachers rooted in mutual love and care. Students of color know when their teachers of color aren’t loved. They can see it in our weariness, frustration and impatience in the same way we can see their pain on their hard days.

Imagine a world where a teacher of color feels safe going to work, and, as a result, can give her best to her students. In that world, our retention is possible. In that world, students see a future for themselves where they, too, are loved and honored. When teachers support each other by truly caring for each other, that future is possible.