The Invisible Backpack Theory: What Every Child, Educator, and Human Carries Inside
A blog by William L. Hartwick — Founder, Author & 27-Year Retired Public School Principal
Why The Invisible Backpack?
From the back cover of my book, The Invisible Backpack:
The Invisible Backpack is a labor of love created from a life-long struggle to come to terms with who the author is and accept himself as he was meant to be. We are all born with an invisible backpack on our backs. It is where we put all the hurts of life. When we are young and courageously climbing the stairs of life, it is extremely light, and we really don't know it's there. As we get older, it gets heavier with whatever pain, grief, or trauma we experience. Unfortunately, we resist taking these feelings out of our backpacks and let go of them. Some of us hold onto them so tightly, we forget to make room for the things that lighten our load...forgiveness, acceptance, tolerance, and love. For if we can put these items in our backpacks, it will cancel out all of the negative things we've been holding onto, and our life journeys will become much lighter.
What Is the Invisible Backpack Theory?
The Invisible Backpack Theory is simple. Every human being walks into a room carrying a backpack that no one else can see. Inside it is everything we have lived through: our fears, our shame, our trauma, our biology, our family, and every word anyone ever said to us. We see a person's behavior on the outside. We do not see the weight they are carrying on the inside. The theory asks us to stop judging the behavior and start understanding the backpack.
I know this because I carried mine for 53 years before I ever opened it. I was a first-grade teacher, a classroom teacher, and a public school principal for 27 years. I am also a man living with Tourette syndrome. I have stood on both sides of the desk. I was the child nobody knew what to do with, and I was the adult who was supposed to know.
“Sit down, shut up, and read” has never worked for 90% of the world. That is my viewpoint after a lifetime in schools. It did not work for me, and it does not work for the child sitting in your classroom right now with a backpack you cannot see.
What Is Packed Inside?
What's the most powerful force on Earth that no one can see, hear, smell, taste, or touch? It can be very destructive, and it can be very gentle. It's the wind. And what's the most powerful force on Earth that no one can see, hear, smell, taste, or touch about somebody else? It's the emotions inside your invisible backpack.
Some of what is packed inside is biology. Tourette's, ADHD, autism, dyslexia, sensory differences. A tic is not a choice. A sound that slips out is not disrespect. A child who cannot sit still is not defying you. Involuntary biology is not defiance, and when we punish it, we add more weight to the backpack.
Some of what is packed inside is pain. Being yelled at. Being sent to the hall. Being laughed at. Being called stupid, lazy, or a problem. Every one of those moments goes into the backpack, and the backpack does not get lighter on its own.
We all say, “I'm fine. I'm doing great. How are you today? I'm OK.” But we are not always OK. We are carrying it.
My Backpack: 35 Years in the Dark
For thirty-five years of my life, I lived in total darkness about why my body betrayed me. I would jump from uncontrollable laughter to sudden tears. Involuntary twitches racked my muscles. Vocal sounds slipped out without permission. And in response, the world around me did what it so often does to children who don't fit the mold: it punished me.
I was labeled functionally illiterate. I couldn't read. I couldn't write. Adults were the worst of all. Dale Thomas kicked me out of class and called me a son of a bitch. Coach Jeff Nynehouse threw up his hands on the team bus, saying he couldn't handle me. The people charged with keeping me safe made me the target of shame. Every one of those days went into my backpack.
In 1982 and 1983, when I was a senior in high school, we used Scantrons. At the top was a little bubble that said “key.” If you filled in that bubble, every test scored behind yours was based on that key. I couldn't read or write very well. So I filled in the key bubble, and I filled in all the answers with C. I never got caught.
Nobody knew I couldn't read. I had never exposed it. I was smart enough to beat the scoring machine, but not able to read enough to fill in the answer I knew. That is what an invisible backpack looks like from the outside: a kid who walks out of the room and says, “I aced it.”
When I went to college at Tau Kappa Epsilon, my fraternity brothers gave me the nickname “Twitch.” For the first time, people saw me and didn't run away. It was brotherhood. That name later became Twitcharoo, the pen name on my children's books.
The diagnosis of Tourette syndrome finally came at age 35. I did not stop teaching. I did not stop leading. But I still had not opened the backpack.
When the Backpack Opens: The Hurricane
I was on a cruise ship in 2005 during Katrina, and I experienced some of the most powerful, destructive wind. Wind, when it is released, can be extremely destructive. So can the emotional wind inside a heavy backpack.
In 2018, exhausted, stressed, and having severe physical tics, I was pulled over. The officers didn't see an educator or a human being with a neurological condition. They saw strange movements, assumed intoxication, and arrested me for a “DUI other than alcohol.” Sitting on the floor of a jail cell, the weight of fifty-three years came crashing down on my head.
That arrest forced me into the place where my new life would begin: the Life Healing Center in July 2018. When I opened up my invisible backpack, I was not kind. I was vicious. I was mean. I was unpredictable. I bottled it up for 53 years, and wow, did I let it go. It did not come out like a gentle breeze. It came out like a Category 5 hurricane.
That is the warning inside the Invisible Backpack Theory. If we do not give children and adults a safe place to unpack, the backpack will open on its own, and it will not be gentle.
A Mind Changed Against Its Will
At the Life Healing Center, the clinicians and counselors did not kick me out into the hall like my high school teachers did. They held the space. That is where I came to understand something I now say everywhere I go:
“A mind changed against its will is of the same opinion still.”
You cannot punish a backpack empty. You cannot yell it lighter. You cannot medicate the shame out of it. In my poem, I wrote the words directly to my physician: “Sorry, Dr. Narus, love is the answer; please start prescribing hugs.”
Take One Thing Out: The TOTO Way to Unpack
So how do you unpack 53 years? You don't, not all at once. You Take One Thing Out. That is TOTO. You can never get to two without one.
One thing. One memory. One fear. One conversation. You take it out, you look at it, and you set it down. Then the backpack is one thing lighter, and you can take the next step.
For a child, one thing might be telling one adult the truth: “I can't read this.” For a teacher, one thing might be asking one question before handing out one consequence: “What are you carrying today?” For a principal, one thing might be one rule that no longer serves the children in the building.
This is why I created The Invisible Backpack Organization: to support others so they don't have to go where I went. I created this organization so your Katrina can be free, and so you can release the invisible wind without being destructive to yourself or to others.
Is the Problem the Child or the Classroom???
How many students excel in PE, science, art, and music? They can cook, play, build, talk, move around, and have fun. Why does the child who can do so much somewhere else become the child who cannot do enough in your classroom? The human being didn't change when the bell rang. The backpack didn't change either. The room did.
I taught first grade for six and a half years. When a child came into my room moving, tapping, humming, or standing up when everybody wanted them seated, I knew something about that experience. In my book, Allow Your Ordinary To Become Extraordinary, I wrote: “I gave him a job. I gave him a reason to move. I gave him a way to be busy that did not require him to be broken first.”
Then I taught a fifth-and-sixth-grade combination class. I wrote: “you cannot run a room on one speed. You differentiate or you fail somebody.”
At Crescent Elk, the students helped create their own code of conduct. They wrote the rules, the expectations, and the consequences in their own words. As I describe in my book: “You stop being the enemy holding the rulebook. You become the person helping them keep the agreement they made.”
None of that required a child to empty the backpack before learning could begin. It required the adults to make room for the backpack.
What Is a Grade?
An A is what we strive for, and if we don't achieve it we're failures. But what is an A? What does that letter tell you about what a human being can do, or what they are carrying?
My Scantron said I passed. It said nothing about the boy who could not read. Intelligence has nothing to do with A, B, C, D, F. It has to do with reality.
I want performance-based education. I want to know what the child understands, what they can demonstrate, and where we can take that success next. In my book, I describe learning as a process instead of a scoreboard: “Not ‘did you get it right,’ but ‘show me how you are getting there.’”
Turn the Pyramid Upside Down
Public education is not a bureaucratic dictatorship. My message to superintendents, school boards, and administrators is to turn the pyramid upside down. The bureaucracy belongs underneath, holding up the teachers and the children, not sitting on top of them.
Every child deserves the same respect and love as the child beside them, regardless of race, creed, color, religion, or gender. Access to learning must not depend on picking and choosing, on what worked for the adult, or on “because I said.”
And say the child's name 100 more times than you say the disability. The diagnosis is something in the backpack. It is not the child. It must never become a label that follows that child around.
What the Invisible Backpack Theory Asks of You
If you are a teacher: before the consequence, ask what the child is carrying.
If you are a parent or caregiver: your child's behavior is a message. Listen to it before you correct it.
If you are an administrator or superintendent: look at the structure. If the classroom requires a child to be broken before teaching can begin, the structure is what needs to change, not the child.
If you are carrying your own backpack: you do not have to open all of it today. Take one thing out.
Don't Ever Let Them Put You in a Box
In the final lines of my poem, I gave a command to every human who carries a difference: “To all of you that have this ‘gift,’ the one that makes me, me: Don't ever let them put you in a box; live and be free.”
Love the child in front of you. Teach them the way they learn. Help them take one thing out. And watch what happens when you allow their ordinary to become extraordinary.
I would like to bring my experience to your school, district, or organization. You can find my books, including The Invisible Backpack and The Many Adventures of Twitcharoo series, my story, and ways to reach me at https://theinvisiblebackpackorganization.com.
“Allow your ordinary to become extraordinary.”
— William L. Hartwick
Founder, The Invisible Backpack Organization
“Where ordinary becomes extraordinary.”
Website: https://theinvisiblebackpackorganization.com
Email: william@theinvisiblebackpackorganization.com
Phone: 904.609.1313