What I Can Change (And What I Refuse to Pretend I Can)

Where the classroom ends and pretending begins

After I published “I Can’t Change Your Kid,” a few people reached out. Some were supportive. Some were uneasy. A few were clearly hoping I’d soften it—maybe buff it a little, round off the corners, maybe add a little reassurance, maybe imply that with enough patience and cleverness, I actually could do the thing I’d just said I couldn’t.

Most of the suggestions asked the same question: “Okay, but what can you change?”

It’s a fair question, and a necessary one. Because naming limits without naming responsibility sounds like surrender, and that’s not what this is. This isn’t a shrug. It’s a boundary.

I can’t change your kid. But I can change a lot of other things—and I refuse to pretend my reach extends past them.

The Stuff I Can Change

I can change the environment I create.

I decide whether my classroom is a place where thinking has room to breathe or just another loud, reactive space where attention is constantly under assault. I can make it predictable without being sterile, serious without being joyless. I can protect focus, slow the pace, and design a room where curiosity has a fighting chance instead of being drowned out by phones, noise, and the constant demand to perform engagement on command. I can push back against any outside attempt to take that away and make my displeasure known. If I’m the asshole, or labeled “not a team player” because I defend instructional time, I’m the asshole. I can live with that.

I can change the expectations, and I can do it without hedging.

I can be explicit—sometimes uncomfortably so—about what effort looks like, what preparation looks like, and what accountability actually means. I can say, plainly and repeatedly, that learning isn’t something I deliver to students like a package; it’s something they have to participate in. I can insist that thinking is part of the job, not an optional upgrade to their OS.

Learning isn’t something I deliver; it’s something students have to do.

I can change what I’m willing to hold the line on.

Deadlines. Precision. Coherent explanations. Whether “almost” counts. Whether confusion is something we patiently work through or something we excuse away because struggle makes adults nervous. I decide whether standards are real or decorative, whether they shape behavior or just decorate syllabi.

I can change how the content shows up in the room.

I can teach with story, with models, with experiments that leave a mark. I can design lessons that reward thinking instead of compliance, that make science feel alive—unfinished, challenging to beliefs, occasionally dangerous, and absolutely worth wrestling with—rather than a checklist students complete and forget.

I can change how I respond to resistance.

I don’t have to escalate every moment into a power struggle. I don’t have to moralize about disengagement or treat it as a personal failure. I can name the choice being made, hold the boundary, and let consequences do their quiet, boring, deeply educational work.

And I can change my own behavior.

I can be prepared. I can be consistent. I can take my craft seriously and let students see that seriousness modeled. I can let them see me make mistakes. I can let them see me ask them for help. I can be patient without being permissive, human without being indulgent. That matters more than most people want to admit.

That’s real power. It’s not unlimited, but it’s substantial.

Which is exactly why I refuse to lie about where it ends.

What I Refuse to Pretend

I will not pretend that schools are where children learn how to be people.

Listening, respect, self-control, responsibility, empathy—these aren’t academic interventions. They’re foundational habits, and they start long before a student ever walks into my room. Teachers can reinforce them, model them, and expect them. We cannot manufacture them on demand. When classrooms are forced to compensate for their absence, instructional time gets eaten alive, learning suffers, and everyone acts surprised—as if this is some baffling mystery instead of a basic mismatch of roles.

That is scope, not blame.

I will not pretend to be able to override a student’s will.

If a student decides not to engage, not to try, not to care, no amount of relationship-building, differentiation, or motivational TikTok teacher-influencer wizardry will change that for them. At best, it creates conditions in which they might choose differently—and that choice is theirs, not mine.

And sometimes, when a student is having a bad day, they’re just having a bad day and not giving a referendum on my approach, the entirety of the education system, or their willingness to prepare for their future. Lord knows I’ve had my share of bad days as well.

I will not pretend I can teach flexibility to someone who has decided that being wrong is intolerable.

I see students with mental postures that are fixed, brittle, and heavily defended. Evidence bounces off. Questions irritate. Revision feels like a loss rather than progress. I press on that. I always have. But I cannot open a closed system from the outside, and I refuse to be held responsible for doors that never crack. Openness to new ideas begins at home, and if they’re coming to my room without that piece of the puzzle, my options are limited at best.

I will not pretend I can outwork neglect.

I can’t undo years of learned helplessness, inconsistent boundaries, or systems that quietly taught students that effort is optional and deadlines are suggestions. I can push against those forces, model something better, and insist on a different standard in my room. I cannot erase them—no matter how much people want me to pretend otherwise.

I will not pretend I can save students from the consequences of their own patterns.

Shielding students from failure doesn’t build resilience; it just delays the reckoning. Sometimes, the most educational thing that happens in my class is a low grade that can’t be negotiated away, because reality doesn’t negotiate.

I will not pretend that a parent’s wishes for a student are always aligned with the student’s own wishes or ability.

College isn’t for everyone, and it isn’t in everyone’s future. Not every student will land at a dream school. Not every child raised in a profession will inherit it. No amount of parental pressure, enforced discipline, or strategic insistence can turn a student whose habits and academic record point one direction into a student destined for another.

My role is to teach and to guide, not to act as an instrument of someone else’s ambition. Sometimes a parent’s hopes align cleanly with a student’s own goals. Sometimes they don’t. When they don’t, I won’t pretend otherwise—or ask a student to carry an adult’s expectations as their own.

I will not pretend compliance is the same thing as growth.

A quiet room isn’t the same as a thinking one. A completed worksheet doesn’t mean understanding. A polite student isn’t automatically a learning student. Confusing optics with outcomes has been educational malpractice for a long time now, and I’m done participating in it.

I will not pretend that phones don’t play a role in any of this.

Student attention. Student self-worth. Student social skills. The ability to sit with confusion, boredom, or effort without reaching for dopamine. We have watched those things erode in real time, and pretending otherwise hasn’t made us compassionate—it’s made us complicit.

I will not pretend the evidence about the harms of phones and social media doesn’t exist just to comply with a do-nothing policy that keeps adults comfortable. I refuse to act as if a student who is functionally addicted to a device has the same cognitive footing as a student who isn’t. That isn’t judgment; it’s physics.

And I flatly reject a worldview that shrugs at the damage phones and social media are doing to kids—damage that is obvious, measurable, and in many cases entirely preventable—and calls that shrug empathy. That’s not empathy. That’s bullshit with a wellness sticker slapped on it and it is actively hurting kids, whether it’s from teachers, parents, leadership, or upper management.

I’ve written a lot about phones. I’m biased.

And I will not pretend that self-sacrifice and caring harder fix everything.

That lie is everywhere in education: If you just care enough, if you just work harder, it’ll work.

No.

Caring matters. It’s necessary. It is not sufficient—and saying otherwise lets systems off the hook.

My job isn’t to change students; it’s to make change possible while opting out of nonsense, honestly.

Here’s the line I actually walk.

My job is not to change your kid. My job is to build a space where change is possible, visible, and rewarded—and where opting out comes with clear, honest consequences. I teach the students who show up. I hold the door open, keep the lights on, and refuse to drag anyone across the threshold.

That isn’t cruelty. It’s respect for students, for learning, and for reality.

And if that makes me less comforting but more honest, I can live with that. Because pretending I have more power than I do doesn’t help kids. It just helps adults feel better about a system that keeps asking teachers to perform miracles instead of telling the truth.

Which brings me to the next line, people want softened even more than this one.

Next time: what I won’t apologize for.