The Art of the Pause

It’s a parenting cliché for a reason, teaching a child to ride a bike. The imagery is familiar: the parent, teary with pride, watches as the child pedals away into their future. In the real world, my experience of this moment recalled none of the sentimentality of a State Farm commercial. My older child had decided that she needed to learn to bike at the height of a New York City heat wave. Accepting that it was too oppressively hot to try such a thing outside, she took the lesson to our building’s fifth-floor hallway, where she attempted discontinuous laps from apartments C to J. Over and over she tried, and over and over, just as she generated enough momentum to lift her feet to the pedals, she crashed into the wall. I only made things worse. Willfully struggling to teach my child this critical life skill, I grasped at the bike frame and ran alongside her, making it impossible for her to balance on her own. I also crashed into the wall.

To her credit, what we lacked in creating this core childhood memory, my kid returned to me as a pedagogy lesson. After repeated failures, she sat up in her bike seat, placed her feet squarely on the ground, and looked me full in the face: “Mama, yo sé que me quieres ayudar, pero si me dejas, lo voy a aprender yo sola.” Mama, she said to me, I know that you want to help me, but if you let me, I will learn to do it on my own. In Spanish, the verb dejar signals both to leave and to let; what my child knew to ask for was that I leave her to let her learn. And she was right. I sat down, and within a few rotations she was in flight.

The moment recalled in my mind an earlier experience, years before, of sleep training my children, implementing what some parenting professionals call the pause: a practice of deliberate hesitation before responding to a baby’s nighttime cries.1 Sleep training has more to do with training the caregivers than the children. It is about teaching adults to wait to interfere, thereby allowing the infant the grace of learning to self-soothe. The child’s ability to acquire a new skill emerges through the temporal span of the parent’s mindful delay, the delay in their resolve to resolve the problem of the other.

I have learned to pause often and mindfully in my interactions with my children, to hesitate before jumping in with solution or answer. When my younger child responds to almost every direct question with “yo no sé,” I wait to see what might follow her initial insistence of not knowing. These moments (or, really, my children) have taught me, in turn, to pause while teaching in the undergraduate classroom. When I pose a question to my students—What do you make of the singing imagery at the end of Ariel Francisco’s poem?2—and one student blurts out, “Like hell if I know,” I laugh, I recall my three-year-old’s comparable declarations of unknowingness, and I wait to see what else might emerge. Waiting, the literary scholar Kevin Quashie writes, “is a place of stillness that is also filled with change.”3 Through the pause, change happens.

That teachers should give students the space to learn, should let them come to answers of their own accord, is pedagogy as old as time. The territory here is well trod.4 What I want to think through is not only what the act of pausing generates for our students or children, but what it surfaces for us, within us, as their teachers or parents, and what ways of thinking and being it might engender. I want to suggest that the act of pausing, an artful and deliberate hesitation, stretches the time and space of the undergraduate classroom to allow for a pedagogy grounded in relation—the values and methods of multiplicity, improvisation, reciprocity, care, and surrender—in contradistinction to the punishing movement towards optimization, objectification, productivity, and measurability that has organized higher education in recent decades. In conversation with the speculative relational methodologies of Joseph M. Pierce, I propose that mindful hesitation in the classroom might generate a world of possibility within the singular moment of its duration.

Disciplines discipline us to believe that, in the classroom, a particular something is supposed to occur. We quiz, and students answer. We teach, and students learn. Skills are developed, ideas are generated. Cause and effect, input and output. It is not difficult to step back to allow student input when teaching is going well. It is easy to hesitate in anticipation of our students’ smart and curious engagement. But what happens in the classroom moments when we ask, we teach, and seemingly nothing occurs? What if we pause in those moments, and there appears to be no result? The cyclist fails to cycle; the reader fails to read; the writer fails to write; the lesson does not land; the idea does not connect—or so we believe. This, of course, is the fear that impels the instructor—the adult in the room whom we perceive to be responsible for the learning of the other—to interrupt, intervene, fill the silence, jump to action.

What happens when we pause, even or especially when learning does not happen as we imagine it should? To ask this question is to ask us to attune to a different frequency of thought and being within the classroom. I am asking what actually happens, not what will happen. The question invites us to attend to what occurs internally within us and between us in real time through the temporal span of the pause. It borrows from the Seon meditation practice of asking “What is this?” to bear witness to the ongoing present.5

In my classroom discussion about Francisco’s poem, no one ever really answered the question about the song. The question floated in the air. But still we waited, quietly. We thought together. Some of us thought about the poem, others likely did not. It is never the case that nothing is happening, though such may be our perception. Circuits of energy and attention, mirror neurons and thought, animate a classroom even as we fail to immediately discern their presence. My attention to that which our attention does not perceive grows from Kathleen Stewart’s formulation of ordinary affects, that which is “transpersonal or prepersonal,” that which is about “bodies literally affecting one another and generating intensities: human bodies, discursive bodies, bodies of thought, bodies of water.”6 The effect of this affect may be good or bad; it may generate a new thought or land at a dead end. The effect is not the point. Instead, the moment of the pause is meaningful unto itself, not for the outcome it engenders, but for the space it gives to allow the interiority and fullness of each person, us and our students, each in our own experience of the classroom space. Waiting, Quashie writes further, “is not urgent…. There is no waiting ‘for,’ no result expected; the act itself is the result, the encounter with one’s interior is the achievement.”7

To wait, to suspend the need for a learning outcome in any given moment, detaches classroom teaching from the drive toward optimization, even if only momentarily. The structuring impetus in higher education to realize goals, achieve outcomes, succeed in learning objectives is grounded fundamentally by a specific story about what should transpire to or for our students and when: a certain what, and a certain when. The curriculum is core and the standards are common. We are told, within educational institutions, to quantify our productivity and measure our success. The class in which I posed the question about the poet Francisco’s chorus of singing men was Introduction to Composition, a standard course across the CUNY curriculum, part of the Required Common Core. English Composition requires that students acquire explicit learning skills: the ability to read critically and analytically, write clearly and coherently, formulate original ideas, and support a thesis (among others).8 These are all good and reasonable and worthy learning outcomes; I take no umbrage with such a list. I only mean to suggest that there are other happenings that also happen in the classroom, that have to do with what happens when people sit together in a room and sit with ideas, spoken aloud or silent, and that these happenings are worthy too, worth the time and space and attention that we might give to them, whether or not they help our students meet externally imposed metrics of success.

If we pause momentarily, if we suspend the need for the right answer or right outcome and surrender to an improvisational emergence, we might temporarily repair the classroom as a relational landscape. Here I learn from the work of Cherokee literary scholar Joseph M. Pierce in Speculative Relations on Indigenous modes of kinship. When Pierce writes that he seeks to approach the works of his analysis, works of Indigenous archival, literary, and visual art, “not as data, but as kin,”9 I am reminded that we, too, can remember to approach our children and our students not as data, but as kin––kin, in Pierce’s definition, as those with whom we experience mutual imbrication. Kinship is “a worlding practice, one that requires not certitude but curiosity,” that facilitates “reparative ways of navigating the world in relation and solidarity.”10 In Pierce’s formulation, speculative practices are foundational to the relational worlding that kinship makes possible and that sustains Indigenous lifeways. Speculation surfaces the space of the possible; speculation is the world of the what could be. In this way, I think of the teacherly pause as a speculative time and space that surfaces the possible.

Within the hesitation of the pause, more and other possibilities become possible: possibilities that are improvisational, relational, suspended, uncertain. A pause might allow us to recall that we are in fact mutually imbricated with our students and children, but that this mutual imbrication need not lead to our anxious attachment to their outcomes. A pause might instead give us the space to model impersonality, in the language of Lauren Berlant,11 or disinterest, in the language of Kandice Chuh, “where there can be intimacy without expectation of obligation, a being together of incoherencies rendered insignificant.”12 A pause might permit space to transgress boundaries and open learning communities, as bell hooks teaches.13 A pause might gesture “not toward the clarity of answers but toward the texture of knowing,” as writes Kathleen Stewart.14 As parents and teachers, we come to know something else, possibly, through the suspended textures of being and waiting and thinking with those in our care.

And then the moment passes. Eventually, someone always says something. We move on, the pause comes to an end. What was known or created through its duration might not be perceivable in the present or the future. But, for a time, bodies shared a space together, relationally, disinterestedly, impersonally, without the demands of agenda or outcome. “The singing works as a kind of proof that life is still happening beneath the chaos,” one of my students wrote weeks after we had paused together with the question about the poem hanging in the air. “When the city seems only loud and exhausting, people are still making music, making meaning, surviving.”15 Though she didn’t say it when I first asked the question, she read the song’s meaning. Though I wouldn’t know it for weeks to come, through the span of the pause, she came to learn something new.

About the Author

Destry Maria Sibley (PhD, English)

Destry Maria Sibley (she/her) received her PhD in English, with an Advanced Concentration in LGBTQ+ Studies, from the CUNY Graduate Center in the spring of 2025. She currently serves as Visiting Research Scholar with the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center, Instructor in the Oral History Master of Arts Program at Columbia University, Senior Producer of the podcast Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel, and parent of two kids.

What is the best piece of parenting advice you’ve received?

Ask for help.

What is the worst piece of parenting advice you’ve received?

Don’t sleep train your baby, it will make them insecurely attached to you.

What is the best piece of teaching advice you’ve received?

Be a person first.

What advice do you want to offer Graduate Center student-teachers who are thinking about parenthood?

Ask for help!

What advice do you want to offer all Graduate Center student-teachers?

Ask for help!