Grappling is a Kind of Knowing That Lives in the Body Before It Makes Sense on Paper

Yesterday in summer school, my third graders hit that wall—the one where the room gets heavy with sighs, pencils clatter too hard on desks, and little voices start to tremble with frustration. We were knee-deep in our STEM challenge, balloon-powered cars—and it wasn’t going how they imagined. Wheels kept rolling off. Tape wouldn’t hold. Balloons refused to behave. One student slumped at her desk, arms crossed tight. Another ripped his car in half and whispered, “I don’t even care anymore,” even though I could tell he did. And for a moment, the room felt stuck, like the whole thing was falling apart.

But what I’ve learned and what I’m still learning—is that this, this right here, is the work. The tension. The confusion. The trying and failing and maybe trying again. This is what grappling looks like in real time. And it’s not clean. It’s not quiet. It is frustrating for everyone! It doesn’t always look like learning from the outside. But it is learning, that slow, embodied, deeply emotional, often messy learning.

And in classrooms where Black and Brown children are so often expected to be perfect, to perform, to impress, to succeed without pause, it feels radical to make room for the mess. To say: you’re allowed to struggle here. You’re allowed to not know. You’re allowed to feel what it means to work through something that doesn’t come easy.

I could have stepped in. I could’ve handed them the answer or restructured the task or softened the challenge. But instead, I took a breath and leaned in. I stepped away and enegaed with something else for moments. Every now and then I came back and sat with them in the storm. Asked questions. Named the frustration without rushing to fix it. And slowly, the energy began to shift. One child helped another tape the axle back on. Another asked if they could try using a straw instead of a balloon. Someone got up and said, “I wanna try again.” And just like that, we were back in it,not because I fixed anything, but because they chose to return to the work. They chose to grapple. Of course there were others who were just over it too.

This post is about that choice. About what it means to let children linger in the in-between. About why we need to stop confusing discomfort with failure. And why, especially for our babies—Black, Brown, brilliant, and exhausted from a world that demands so much of them, grappling is not just a skill. It is a sacred inheritance. It is what got me to be the woman I am today, that grapple and grit.

Keep reading. Let’s talk about it.

Grappling, for Black and Brown children, isn’t just some trendy word educators throw around when they want to look like they value struggle it’s something much older, much deeper, something wrapped in flesh and memory, in muscle and story, something our ancestors had to perfect just to survive systems designed to crush not just our dreams but the very possibility of us imagining differently. Living a whole nother life for real. This is why belief is so important in my work.

And maybe we forget that sometimes, in these classrooms filled with data points and pacing calendars and rubrics so sharp they cut the soul out of learning, that grappling is actually a kind of ceremony, a return, a resistance, a slow dance with difficulty that doesn't rush toward solution but asks, what does it mean to be with the thing you don’t yet understand?

And when our kids hesitate, or stall, or take the long way around a question, it’s not always because they’re off-task or unmotivated or behind, it might just be because they’re in the middle of becoming, and becoming is loud sometimes and quiet sometimes and doesn’t always show up in the ways we’ve been taught to measure.

Grappling, for us, is an echo, it’s the whispered lessons of those who had to figure it out with no blueprint, no cushion, no net, just will and breath and maybe a prayer passed down in a look or a hum or a hand on the shoulder and to teach our babies to grapple is not to make them suffer but to give them back a piece of themselves that this world keeps trying to smooth out, sanitize, and erase.

There’s softness in grappling, not because it’s easy, but because it requires you to stay open when everything in you wants to shut down; because it means holding questions longer than feels comfortable, and staying in the tension without needing to fix it right away, and that kind of vulnerability is one of the most powerful things we can offer our children in a world that tells them their value lives only in right answers, in speed, in polished performance. Our lineage knows better. Our lineage knows that brilliance is sometimes messy, that the most beautiful breakthroughs often arrive after the tears, after the silence, after the deep breath you take when you’re not sure if you’re doing it right but you keep going anyway, and that’s the kind of knowing that no test can capture but that our spirits recognize instantly when we see it rise in a child’s eyes, in their hands, in their refusal to give up on themselves.

Who taught these babies to give up immediately?

So yes, let them grapple—not as punishment, not as spectacle, but as a sacred practice of remembering that they are allowed to take up space in the unknown, that they can fall and get back up and not be shamed for the falling, that their learning is not linear or sterile but full of color and pause and noise and stillness and all the contradictions that make us whole. They will come to know that life is about returning to that space of wholeness.

Let them grapple like our people did, with dignity, with breath, with softness laced in steel. Let them learn how to hold a question like a seed, water it with wonder, and wait, patiently, for it to bloom. Because in that waiting, in that struggle, in that not-yet—but I’m still trying—that is where the becoming lives. And we owe them the space to become.