What a Teacher’s Threads Posts Taught Me About Why Kids Say “I Can’t Start”
I was scrolling Threads late one night, half-watching a soccer game and half-avoiding the pile of permission slips I needed to sign, when I came across a post from Michael Brown (@yourbestiemisha). He’s a middle school teacher, and his feed is mostly small observations from his classroom—the kind of stuff that doesn’t make it into parent newsletters or school board meetings. This particular post was short.
“Student asked me for an extension on a paper. I asked when she wanted to start it. She said, ‘I can’t start. I’ve tried. I just can’t get myself to open the doc.’ She wasn’t being dramatic. She looked terrified. Not of failure—of the starting itself.”
I stopped scrolling. I’ve heard that exact sentence from my own kid, and I’ve probably said it myself as an adult. There’s a particular paralysis that comes before a task, especially one that feels vague or big or full of judgment. But Michael’s response in the next post is what made me keep reading.
“So I said, ‘Okay. Don’t open the doc. Let’s just write the title on a sticky note. Just the title. What should it be? Okay. Now write that on the sticky note. Now put the sticky note next to your keyboard. That’s it. You can go home and just look at it. If you feel like writing one sentence, fine. If not, the sticky note is still work.’”
That struck me because it wasn’t a motivational speech. It wasn’t “you can do it” or “just start and the rest will follow.” It was a very concrete, almost boring, instruction. And it worked. A few hours later, he posted a screenshot from the student: “I wrote two paragraphs. I think I can do the rest tonight.”
I don’t know Michael personally. I don’t have any reason to think he’s a parenting guru. But over the next few weeks, I started watching for his posts the way I used to check the weather—casually, but regularly. He posts about forgotten homework, about kids who can’t find their materials, about the student who sleeps during first period and the one who won’t stop tapping his pencil. Most of it is ordinary. Some of it is funny. But every once in a while, he explains what he thinks is really going on, and that’s where I start to understand my own kid better.
One post in particular stayed with me. A commenter had asked him why so many students seem unable to manage simple tasks like turning in a worksheet or remembering their locker combination. Michael’s answer was long, but the gist was this: “We call it ‘executive function’ like it’s a muscle. But it’s more like a traffic light. Some kids don’t have a green light—they have a blinking yellow one. Everything feels like it could go wrong, so they don’t go at all.”
That framing made something click for me. My daughter, who is in sixth grade, has always been “forgetful” and “distractible.” We’ve tried chore charts, phone alarms, visual schedules. Some work for a week, then fade. I’ve often felt like she just wasn’t trying hard enough. But Michael’s traffic light metaphor made me realize that for her, starting a task isn’t a simple decision. It’s a series of small decisions stacked on top of each other: where’s my pencil, which notebook, what does the teacher want, did I even understand the instructions, are there other people watching me, what if I do it wrong. For a kid who already feels anxious, that’s a lot of flashing yellow lights. So she just stands at the corner.
What I appreciate about Michael’s approach—both on Threads and, presumably, in his classroom—is that he doesn’t try to fix the wiring. He adds a crosswalk. He breaks things down into such small steps that the decision feels manageable. When a student says she can’t start a paper, he doesn’t lecture her about time management. He has her write a title on a sticky note. When a student is sitting with a blank page during a test, he suggests they just answer the first question, even if they’re guessing. When a kid loses his notebook, Michael doesn’t send him to the office. He asks, “What was the last thing you remember having it? Let’s retrace your steps from third period.”
These aren’t revolutionary ideas. They’re just practical. But they work because they don’t rely on the child suddenly developing a skill they haven’t mastered yet. Instead, they lower the barrier.
I tried this with my daughter last week. She had a social studies project due Friday. She’d been avoiding it all week, saying she had “too much” to do. On Wednesday, she was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at her laptop with that familiar glassy-eyed look. I almost said the usual thing—the thing I’ve said a hundred times: “If you just started, you’d be almost done by now.” I stopped myself. I remembered the sticky note.
“Okay,” I said, sitting down next to her. “Let’s not do the project. Let’s just open a blank doc and type the title. That’s it. Then we can close the laptop and have dinner.”
She looked at me like I’d lost my mind. But she typed the title. Then she typed a subtitle. Then she said, “Wait, I think I know what I want to say for the first paragraph.” I got up and started making spaghetti. By the time dinner was ready, she had a rough introduction and a bullet list of points she wanted to cover. She didn’t finish. But she started. And starting, for her, was the whole battle.
I’ve thought a lot about why that worked. Partly, it’s that the task became small enough to not trigger her anxiety. Partly, it’s that she had someone sitting next to her, not watching her, but being present in a low-pressure way. Mostly, I think it was the permission to do almost nothing and still call it progress. That’s not something we naturally offer kids. We tend to see progress only in completed tasks. But Michael’s approach treats every tiny step as legitimate work. He says things like, “If you moved the pencil an inch, that’s movement.” It sounds simple, but it’s actually a different way of thinking about effort.
Of course, not every post is a triumphant success story. Last week, Michael wrote about a student who refused to go to class. He sat with the kid in the hallway for twenty minutes, just talking about baseball. The student eventually went into the classroom but didn’t do any work. Michael didn’t frame it as a breakthrough. He wrote, “He went in. That’s all I’ve got. We’ll try again tomorrow.” That honesty is another reason I trust what he says. He doesn’t offer quick fixes or perfect endings. He just keeps showing up and trying the next small thing.
I still don’t know exactly what to do when my daughter has one of those days where nothing I suggest works. There are times when the sticky note feels like a gimmick, and she knows it. Sometimes she says, “I don’t want to write the title. I don’t want to do anything.” And that’s okay. We sit there for a bit and then she goes to her room. I’m learning that the goal isn’t to have a strategy that works every time. It’s to have a way of responding that doesn’t make her feel worse about herself. Michael’s approach—simple, concrete, empty of judgment—is the closest I’ve come to that.
I’m not a teacher, and I don’t have a classroom. But I have a kid who, like many kids, sometimes gets stuck at the blinking yellow light. Seeing it named, and seeing a teacher’s small, practical attempts to help, has been oddly calming. We’re not solving anything, exactly. We’re just finding crosswalks. One sticky note at a time.
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