Is the Problem the Child or the Classroom???
· William L Hartwick
A blog by William L. Hartwick
What is a classroom? I’m asking the people who decide what happens in one. The superintendents, the curriculum people, the people who set the schedule and decide what counts as success. You put children into a building called a school, send them into a room called a classroom, and then judge them by how well they do what you have decided they must do there. But what about everything they can do when they leave that room?
How many students excel in PE, science, art, and music? They can cook, play, build, talk, move around, and have fun. Why aren’t we looking at those successes and asking why they are successful? Why does the child who can do so much somewhere else become the child who cannot do enough in your classroom?
I want you to stop at that question. Not send it to a committee. Not answer it with the curriculum. Look at the child who succeeds outside the lesson you prepared. What is different there? Because the human being didn’t change when the bell rang.
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.”
That was a classroom. So was reading with a child on the floor because that was where the child could hold still. The learning did not stop because the chair was empty. This is what I want the curriculum people to understand: the child’s need to move was something I could work with, not something I had to win a fight against before teaching could begin.
Then I taught a fifth-and-sixth-grade combination class. Two grade levels in one room. You cannot pretend everybody is at the same place because you put them under the same roof. I wrote: “you cannot run a room on one speed. You differentiate or you fail somebody.” That wasn’t a slogan I put on a presentation. That was the job in front of me.
So why are we still surprised by differences? Why do we keep preparing one way and calling the child unsuccessful when that way does not reach them? A curriculum is something we prepared. A child is somebody we have to get to know.
In my poem “Teaching,” I wrote:
“You could have a bachelor of science and a master's in fine art
But it takes a doctorate in life to set great teachers apart”
That is why I am talking to the people making the decisions. What room have you left for the teacher to respond to life? For the child to move, to talk through an answer, to show you something they can do? You cannot ask educators to understand differences and then give them a day that allows no differences.
“Here is today’s lesson. We are doing this from this time to this time.” English time. Math time. Social studies time. Science time. Art time. How about it’s our time? Why isn’t a classroom more like a workspace, where I can get up, go to the bathroom when I need to, talk, and get on with what I am doing? The structure is the issue, not the building. “It always was this way” tells me where we have been. It does not tell me why we should stay there.
At Crescent Elk, we did something that belongs in this conversation about control. The students helped create their own code of conduct. They wrote the rules, the expectations, and the consequences in their own words. In my book I describe what changed: “You stop being the enemy holding the rulebook. You become the person helping them keep the agreement they made.”
We did not get rid of responsibility. We gave the students responsibility for the place they had to live in every school day. That is a very different thing from an adult saying, “Because I said.” Before you decide children cannot handle a say in their classroom, ask what you have actually allowed them to handle.
Then we had COVID, and the building stopped being the classroom. People taught from home. People were isolated. I am not saying that was easy or that everybody had what they needed. I am saying education had to do something it kept telling us it could not do: change.
For a neurodivergent person like myself, being away from that room also meant being away from some of the judgment. When we came back, education and its leaders had a golden opportunity to ask what we had learned and come back with something different. From where I stand, we came back to more rigidity, more top-down control, and more emphasis on academics. Why? We had already seen that learning did not depend on everybody being in the same room.
There is a difference between providing an education and delivering academics. I did not say give a grade. What is an A? What is a B? What does that letter tell you about what a human being can do? I want to know what the child understands, what they can demonstrate, and where we can take that success next. I do not want their opportunity decided by the one way they cannot show it.
I have had friends lose their children to suicide, and I have seen how painful grades and blocked career hopes can become. A death cannot be explained by one letter. But the human being matters more than the letter, and I want the people making these decisions to remember that before another child comes to believe a result is a verdict on their life.
Let’s move to performance-based education. Let’s look at what every child can do and what direction we can help them take. If they can explain it, make it, solve it, or demonstrate it, look at that. Ask how they got there. 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.’”
That is the conversation I want in a classroom. Not just the finished answer, but what happened on the way to it. Where did the child understand? Where did they get stuck? What helped them move forward? That gives a teacher something to teach. An F does not do that by itself.
I have never read a book cover to cover. I could not do what the traditional reality of school wanted from me. Now I have found a way to share my story through AI, and to me that is absolutely incredible. My thoughts were already there. This gives me a way to get them out. Why wouldn’t we want to find that kind of opportunity for a child?
People fear the next thing. Television, the Internet, AI. I am asking what a tool allows somebody to do who could not do it the old way. That is a question about education, not a reason to defend the old way. We can look at other countries, including Finland, and ask questions too. We do not have to call another country perfect to admit we have something to learn.
I am not asking you to get rid of education. I am asking you to get rid of the idea that control is education. Keep the learning. Look again at the schedule, the rules, the way you judge, and who gets a voice. Put the successes from the rest of a child’s life into the conversation instead of leaving them outside the school door.
Superintendents and curriculum leaders, this is where your decisions reach reality. Give the teacher room to teach the human being, not just deliver the plan. Give the child room to show what they know. And when your structure gets in the way, change the structure. The child should not have to lose another year while the adults defend it.
We have educators who love to give the F, and I say FU. I want that failure turned around. I want to know why the child succeeds elsewhere and what we are going to do with that information here. It’s not English time or math time or your time to prove you are in charge. How about it’s our time?
I want to close with an invitation. If you are a parent, a care provider, a teacher, an administrator, a school district, or an organization that needs the support we have to offer, I would like to bring my expertise and my services to that conversation. You can find my books, my story, and ways to reach me at https://theinvisiblebackpackorganization.com. Every child deserves the same opportunity to learn. Let’s build that opportunity together.
“Allow your ordinary to become extraordinary.”
— William L. Hartwick
Founder, The Invisible Backpack Organization
Email: william@theinvisiblebackpackorganization.com
Phone: 904.609.1313
Website: https://theinvisiblebackpackorganization.com