If I could change one thing about the education system, it would be how we talk about kids who struggle
Ms. Reyes had her clipboard out before I even sat down. She’d drawn a small table on a piece of paper, with check marks and blank spaces next to Leah’s name. Missing homework, three days in a row. Late to start morning work, twice. She said the phrase I’d been dreading all week: “Leah is a bright kid, but she’s not working up to her potential.”
Leah sat in the tiny blue chair beside me, tracing the edge of her sweater sleeve with her thumb. She wasn’t looking at Ms. Reyes. She wasn’t looking at me either.
“What’s going on at home?” the teacher asked, in that voice that means well but lands like an accusation. “Does she have a set time for homework? A quiet space?”
I gave the usual answers. Yes, we have a desk. Yes, we have a routine. No, she doesn’t have a tablet during study time. All true. But what I didn’t say was that every night that week, Leah had stared at her math worksheet for twenty minutes, written nothing, and then asked me if she could read a book about deep-sea creatures instead. And every night, I’d said some version of “finish the work first.”
Because that’s what you’re supposed to do, right? The work comes first. The book is the reward. I’d heard my own father’s voice coming out of my mouth.
When we got home, she went straight to her room. I stood in the hallway and heard her talking to herself, which she does when she’s working on something. I found her under her desk, surrounded by empty toilet paper rolls, string, and a pair of my old socks. She was building a shelter for her stuffed dog, complete with a pulley system for dropping treats from the top. She’d drawn a small diagram on a piece of scrap paper and labeled it “Feed the Dog Machine.”
That was the moment. Not a movie moment, not a big epiphany. Just me standing there with my arms crossed, watching her move a piece of string and mutter about counterweights. She is not lazy, I realized. She just hasn’t seen the point of the worksheet.
I don’t think Ms. Reyes is a bad teacher. She isn’t. She’s stretched across twenty-two kids and two reading groups and a math curriculum that moves faster than anyone wants it to. The problem isn’t her. The problem is the system’s obsession with sameness—the assumption that all kids should learn the same thing, at the same speed, in the same time slot, and that struggle is a sign of something being wrong.
If I could change one thing about education, it wouldn’t be testing, though I’d love to cut back on that too. It wouldn’t be class size, or funding formulas, or school lunches, though all of those matter deeply. It would be our relationship with time.
We treat time as fixed and learning as variable. The school year is a certain number of weeks. The lesson is forty-five minutes. The worksheet is due Friday. Every child is expected to fit their learning into those rigid boxes, and when they don’t, we label them. “Slow.” “Behind.” “Not meeting expectations.”
But time isn’t a container. Learning is what takes time. Some kids need thirty minutes to understand a concept another kid grasps in five. Some need to build a pulley system to care about math at all. Right now, we design for the middle and then penalize everyone who lands outside of it—the kids who need longer, and also the ones who need less.
After that conference, I made a small change. Not a big one. No whiteboard charts or reward jars. I just stopped forcing the worksheet first every single night.
Instead, I asked Leah what she was curious about. She said she wanted to know how animals keep warm in winter. So we went to the library and got three books, and I asked Ms. Reyes if Leah could do one of her assignments as a project instead of a packet, just for a week. She hesitated, then said sure.
Leah built a poster about hibernation. It wasn’t neat. The handwriting slanted sideways. A few facts were slightly wrong. But she spent two hours on it, entirely on her own, and she read each of those books cover to cover. On Friday, she brought it to school and stood up in front of her class and explained, in her halting, quiet voice, that bears don’t actually sleep the whole winter—they go into a state called torpor. Ms. Reyes wrote me a short note saying Leah was more engaged than she’d seen her all month.
We still struggle. The math packet is still a fight on Tuesdays. Spelling words get done in the car on the way to school, and I’m not proud of that. But something has loosened at home. I stopped saying “get it done” and started saying “where do you want to start?” I stopped hiding the timer and started using it as a plan for our evening, not a stopwatch for her brain. Those small shifts—asking a child’s teacher if one assignment can be swapped for a project, letting a child work while lying on the floor instead of at a desk, telling her I’m less interested in the check mark than in what she’s thinking about—they don’t change the system. They just make the edges softer.
My son is the opposite. He finishes his work in five minutes and then sits there, waiting, with nothing to do. His teacher calls him “efficient” and gives him extra worksheets. I wish she’d give him a harder book, or a puzzle, or permission to go build something. The fixed pace hurts him too. He’s bored, and boredom in school looks a lot like laziness.
The other night, Leah came into my room holding the dinosaur book she’d read three times. She was asking me how scientists know the colors of animals that lived so long ago. We talked about fossilized pigment and about birds being the things that survived. After she left, I sat with that conversation for a while.
She doesn’t say “I’m bad at school” anymore. She still says she doesn’t like math, but she doesn’t say she’s bad at it. I don’t know if that will last. Next year there will be a new teacher, a new clipboard, a new set of expectations. I can’t remake the whole system from my kitchen table. But I can hold the line on one thing: I will not let a report card tell me what my child is capable of. And if a teacher tells me she’s falling behind, I’ll ask the question I wish I’d asked that day in the conference room: “Behind what, exactly? And where is she going?”
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