Staying in the Room: What 13 Minutes of Discomfort Revealed About Our Schools

This piece was inspired by Dr. James Borishade's LinkedIn post reflecting on Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show. I'm grateful for his insight and encourage you to read his full reflection.

Sometimes a cultural moment reveals patterns we've been living with all along but couldn't quite see. The reaction to (preceding and following) this year's Super Bowl halftime show was one of those moments.

13 Minutes of Discomfort

This year's Super Bowl featured the first halftime show performed entirely in Spanish. The reaction from many viewers was swift: they complained about not understanding it.

Dr. James Borishade with Urban Ministries captured why that response matters. For just 13 minutes, he explained, some Americans experienced what millions of people in the United States feel every single day--being in a space that wasn't designed for them, hearing something they couldn't fully access, feeling like outsiders.

Dr. Borishade observed that for 13 minutes, the shoe was on the other foot, and a lot of people didn't like how it fit.

As educators, we need to sit with this.

What This Reveals About Our Schools

How many of our students spend every single day in spaces that weren't designed with them at the center?

The student whose home language isn't English, sitting through lessons, assessments, and announcements they only partially understand--smiling and nodding, hoping they caught enough to succeed.

The student whose name gets butchered by every substitute teacher--or substituted for one their peers are more comfortable pronouncing--who stops correcting people because it's easier to just accept the mispronunciation or renaming.

The student whose culture, history, and family structure are invisible in the curriculum--or worse, reduced to a single month, a single story, a surface-level celebration.

The student who watches adults in their school talk about "those families" as if their own family isn't standing right there.

For 13 minutes, some Americans felt what it's like to be on the outside. The response from many wasn't curiosity--it was contempt. Some people literally created an alternative "All American Halftime Show" rather than sit with 13 minutes of discomfort.

The Pattern of Pulling Away

Dr. Borishade names it:

Creating a separate show because you can't sit with 13 minutes of a language you don't speak...that is the pattern. When something is unfamiliar, we pull away. We build a separate room. Then we wonder why we can't understand each other.

This is what happens in schools too.

When students bring languages, cultures, or experiences we don't understand, we have a choice: move toward curiosity or pull away into comfort.

• Do we learn to pronounce names correctly, or do we give up and assign nicknames?

• Do we learn about students' home cultures and incorporate them into our teaching, or do we expect students to leave their identities at the door?

• Do we create space for multiple languages in our schools, or do we treat English as the only language that matters?

• Do we sit with the discomfort of not understanding, or do we build separate rooms--separate tracks, separate programs, separate expectations--and call it "meeting students where they are"?

Our students have been extending the invitation to stay in the room forever. They show up every day to schools that weren't designed with them at the center, and they adapt. They code-switch. They translate. They navigate systems that weren't built for them.

What if we met them halfway?

What Will You Do Differently?

This week, identify one place where you've been pulling away and commit to staying in the room instead.

This might look like:

• Learning to correctly pronounce a student's name you've been avoiding

• Asking a family to teach you a phrase in their home language

• Incorporating students' cultural knowledge into a lesson

• Creating space for multiple languages in your classroom

• Sitting with discomfort instead of building a separate space

This discomfort of not understanding doesn't have to be the end. It can be the beginning.

Connecting across differences requires curiosity, not agreement. It requires the willingness to sit with discomfort instead of building separate spaces. Our students do this every single day.

What if we did too?