What a Hard Class Taught Me About Being Stuck
Stop Treating Creative Blocks Like a Personal Flaw. Start Treating Them Like a Design Signal.
On paper, what I’m building sounds straightforward: a phonics skills practice tool for older elementary, middle, and high school students. Something that doesn’t feel babyish, something that respects their age and their dignity.
In real life? I’m stuck.
Not in a “I don’t care” kind of way. More like the frustrating kind where you care so much that every next step starts feeling like it has to be the right one. And when it can’t be perfect, it becomes easier to reorganize notes, rename files, open tabs… and call it progress.
Because avoidance is very efficient when it’s dressed up as productivity.
The work isn’t always stuck. Sometimes the structure is.
That sentence applies to kids.
It also applies to me.
And lately, I’ve been stuck enough that I’ve started asking the question people don’t like to say out loud:
What if I should just give up?
Not dramatically. Not in a quitting-everything kind of way. More like… maybe this isn’t doable. Or maybe it is doable, but it’s not doable for me. Or maybe it’s a good idea, just not the right time.
That’s where my brain goes when momentum disappears.
I Went Looking for Phonics. I Found a Mirror.
When I couldn’t find traction, I went back to what had been proven. I started digging for old work from my time as an Instructional Coach—specifically anything connected to phonics instruction, hoping something would spark.
I wasn’t looking for inspiration.
I was looking for structure.
But instead of finding a clean folder labeled “phonics resources,” I stumbled into my old blog, More Conversations with Myself (now defunct), and got lost rereading post after post.
And then I hit one from April 29, 2016.
It stopped me cold because it dropped me right back into January 2016.
When Public Education Did What Public Education Does
In January 2016, there was a budgeting crisis. Let’s be honest, there is always a budgeting crisis it seems in public education. The instructional coach positions were dissolved mid-year. Coaches were reassigned into classrooms that had long-term subs.
I was placed into a fifth grade class at a school I had taught at previously.
And when I say “placed into,” I mean dropped into.
This class didn’t just have “needs.” It had a history.
School had started in August. By the time I arrived in January, that class had already been through one teacher and three long-term subs.
Two of those subs had experiences so intense that ambulances were called for them during the day.
And for the first 80 days of the school year, those students had no curriculum instruction of any importance.
So you had a group of kids with huge academic gaps, zero consistent routines, and months of adults cycling in and out.
They were wild.
Out of control.
And I’m careful with my words, but this is one of those times where understatement helps no one.
Turning a Class Around Wasn’t Magic. It Was Implementation.
I’m nothing if not stubborn. And I’ve always been very good with classroom management.
So I did what I do: I started building structure where there had been chaos. I held a line. I paired high expectations with support. I made it safe to struggle, but I did not make it optional.
And the shift happened fast enough that it startled people.
“You need to write a book about this.”
The second week I had the class, our digital coach co-taught a lesson with me.
Afterwards, she looked at me, completely serious, and said I needed to write a book about how to turn a class around in less than seven days.
Not as a cute compliment.
As in: I’ve seen a lot, and what you’re doing is rare.
“You’ve had them longer than that.”
The first sub who had the class, who was miserable with them and used to say so whenever I ran into him prior to taking over the class, came into my room later to grab some students for intervention.
He asked how long I’d had the class.
I told him, “Today was my eleventh day.”
He told me I was wrong.
He said I’d clearly been teaching them longer because they were such a different class.
I told him, “Nope. I took over January 4th. It had only been eleven days.”
He just stared at me with this look of massive respect on his face.
When the whole building saw it
Even later, when I walked down the hallways with that class, teachers, and even admin, commented on how well-behaved they were and how they seemed like a completely different group of students.
And they weren’t exaggerating.
Because they remembered what that class had been like before structure showed up and stayed.
What Students Do When Adults Keep Leaving
When I took over, I didn’t walk into a blank slate.
I walked into a room full of kids who had learned, through sheer repetition, that adults leave.
Months of instability didn’t just create gaps. It created a culture of self-protection.
And self-protection in kids often looked like this:
I don’t care.
This is stupid.
I’m not doing that.
You can’t make me.
Or the quiet version: I’ll do the bare minimum so no one finds out I’m lost.
So I built structure. I held the line. I made it safe to struggle, but I did not make it optional.
The Girl Who Didn’t Like Me Until She Could Do It
One of my students made it very clear when I took over: she did not like me.
Not subtly. Not quietly. Directly. And often.
And it wasn’t because I was mean.
It was because I wouldn’t let her take the easy way out in math.
Math was the subject she struggled with most, and she had a whole system built around avoiding the feeling of not knowing. If something was hard, she’d shut down. If she shut down long enough, someone would rescue her.
Except I didn’t.
I coached her through the productive struggle, step by step, problem by problem, until she could do it.
And here’s the part that still gets me:
By the end of that year, months later, she LOVED me.
And she loved math.
When my students wrote about highlights of the year, she wrote that a highlight was me becoming her teacher because I taught her to believe in herself. She wrote that she didn’t have self-confidence when I became her teacher, but because of me she now had self-confidence, and she knew she could do anything because I taught her the Growth Mindset.
I cried when she showed me that.
Not because I needed the compliment.
But because I know how rare it is for a child to name the moment their inner voice changed.
The Parent Who Named the Real Outcome
Around that same time, a parent told me something I will never forget:
One of the greatest things you gave my daughter this year was self-confidence.
Her daughter had struggled academically for a long time. English was a second language. Over time, that struggle had turned into a story she believed about herself.
Not: I’m learning.
Not: I’m getting there.
But: I’m not good at school.
What that parent saw by the end of the year wasn’t just improvement on paper. She saw her daughter trying differently. Showing up differently. Participating differently.
And the following year, that student was one of the top students in her class.
Confidence isn’t fluff.
Confidence is the difference between a student who practices and a student who hides.
The Power of Yet, Caught in the Wild
I had another fifth grader who loved the quote posters I kept around my desk and classroom that were Growth Mindset quotes and reminders about the Power of Yet.
She wrote them down in her notebook.
She quoted them to me.
And she quoted them to classmates when someone was struggling.
It was hilarious and adorable… and it was also instructional data.
Because when students started repeating the language in real time, when the struggle was happening, that wasn’t decoration anymore.
That was a shift in internal dialogue.
Reading Intervention Worked Better With a Team That Stayed
At my former school site, there was another student, one of those kids who struggled academically and socially, the kind of student who ended up labeled “difficult” because he wasn’t the “perfect” kid in either category.
That year, I worked hard with him. And I wasn’t working alone.
Nana was in my classroom a lot.
Nana was a former kindergarten teacher with decades of experience. She retired when her grandkids were born. I had taught both of her grandkids, and when they moved on to middle school, Nana moved with me in the best way. Wherever I taught, she showed up to give my students extra reading instructional support.
We were a well-oiled reading instruction team.
And that mattered, because some kids don’t need a brand new strategy every week.
They need steady routines. Consistent language. Calm coaching.
Over and over.
Until the work starts to feel possible.
At the end of the year, that student told me, so proud, that things used to be really hard for him, but I taught him how to make it not hard… and now it was easier.
The next year, Nana volunteered in the classroom he was in and told me how much he had improved academically.
That kind of growth didn’t happen because someone finally found the perfect program.
It happened because the adults stayed consistent long enough with effective instructional strategies and emotional support for a kid to believe the work could change.
This Wasn’t Inspiration. It Was Implementation.
Rereading that post didn’t make me feel inspired.
It helped me remember.
Because those stories weren’t just sweet memories.
They were evidence.
Confidence isn’t a personality trait some kids are born with and others aren’t.
Confidence is often an instructional outcome.
It follows structure.
It follows consistency.
It follows feedback.
It follows adults who refuse to let students opt out, while also refusing to abandon them inside the struggle.
The secret was never a poster.
The posters helped. The language mattered. “Yet” mattered.
But the shift came from something more concrete:
high expectations with support
productive struggle (not productive rescue)
consistent feedback loops
language that rewired self-talk
adults who stayed long enough for trust to form
Why This Matters for Older Students and Phonics
Older students still need foundational literacy support sometimes. Phonics included.
But by the time a student is in upper elementary, middle school, or high school, the barrier usually isn’t just “Can they do it?”
It’s: What does it cost them emotionally to practice what they can’t do yet?
Because tools and systems have a way of turning skill gaps into shame.
A lot of literacy tools accidentally send the same message:
“This is for little kids.”
Older students pick that up instantly.
They don’t refuse practice because they’re lazy.
They refuse because they are protecting themselves.
Dignity is part of the intervention.
If the tool is “cute” but makes a 13-year-old feel small, it’s not a good tool.
If the practice is accurate but looks babyish, you’ll lose the exact students who need it most.
So my design constraints aren’t negotiable:
age-respectful experience (visuals, tone, pacing)
private practice that builds public confidence
repetition that doesn’t feel like punishment
progress that’s motivating without being childish
And Here’s the Part I’m Still Working Out
I’ve been telling myself I’m building an app.
But being stuck long enough has a way of forcing honesty.
I’ve hit the point in this creative block where I’ve wondered if I should just stop. Give up. Let it go. Not because I don’t care, but because maybe it isn’t doable… or maybe it’s doable but not for me… or maybe it’s a good idea but not the right time.
And then rereading 2016 shifted the question on me.
Because I realized I had asked the exact same thing of students, just in a kid-sized version:
What if I can’t do this? What if I’m not good at this? What if I should just stop?
I didn’t let them build their identity around that question.
I gave them structure instead.
So now I’m paying attention to the possibility that my block is pointing to a form mismatch, not a capability problem.
What if it isn’t an app that needs to be created?
What if the thing I’m supposed to build is something else, something that still solves the same problem (older students need phonics practice with dignity), but in a different form?
A few possibilities I’m genuinely considering:
Maybe it’s a “thin tool,” not a full app.
A web-based practice experience. One job. One loop. No bloat. No overwhelm. Just clean repetition, feedback, and progress.
Maybe it’s a kit schools can implement.
A set of age-respectful routines, printable/interactive materials, and a clear progress system that makes implementation possible even without perfect tech conditions.
Maybe it’s a set of micro-interventions teachers can actually sustain.
Short, repeatable phonics routines designed for older students, built to fit real classrooms, not ideal ones.
Maybe it’s a design system schools can use.
Because the bigger problem isn’t “phonics.” It’s dignity + follow-through. A tool doesn’t fix that by itself. A system can.
I don’t have a final answer yet.
But I’m paying attention to the signal: stuck might be pointing to structure—not failure.
What I’m Doing Next (Because “Stuck” Isn’t a Strategy)
I’m trying to treat my creative block the same way I treated that classroom in 2016.
Not with drama.
With structure.
1) Name the non-negotiables (and let them eliminate decisions)
Dignity, age-respectful design, clear skill progression, and practice that feels doable.
If an idea conflicts with those, it’s out.
Not because it’s a bad idea, because it’s the wrong idea for this purpose.
2) Build one thin slice
Not the whole platform. Not the whole vision.
One complete loop:
one skill pathway
one practice routine
one feedback/progress indicator
Momentum first.
3) Test it against the moment students usually shut down
Not a theoretical student.
A real moment I’ve seen a hundred times: the moment a student realizes the task might expose what they don’t know.
That’s where they shut down.
That’s where they act out.
That’s where they disappear.
If what I build can hold a student through that moment, without shaming them, that’s the work.
What Rereading 2016 Shifted in Me
Here’s what changed when I reread that post from April 2016, and then remembered what those kids wrote.
It didn’t make me nostalgic.
It made me honest.
Because the students didn’t write about my bulletin boards. They didn’t write about my lessons being fun. They didn’t write about anything “Pinterest-worthy.”
They wrote about believing in themselves.
They wrote about learning to stay in the struggle.
They wrote about confidence, earned confidence, the kind you only get when someone holds a line and doesn’t abandon you inside it.
And that forced me to look at my current creative block differently.
My brain has been treating this like a verdict: If it isn’t moving, it must not be meant to happen.
But my lived experience says something else:
When something matters, the messy middle is part of it.
When something is worth building, it often starts with discomfort.
And “yet” isn’t something I get to teach and then opt out of when it’s inconvenient.
So no, I don’t suddenly have the whole answer. I don’t suddenly have the perfect next version of the app, or the perfect alternative if it turns into something else.
But I do have my perspective back.
Because rereading 2016 reminded me of the most important implementation truth I’ve ever learned:
The work changes when you stop asking, “Can I do this?” and start asking, “What structure do I need to stay in this long enough to learn it?”
And that question feels solvable.
That question feels like forward motion.
That question feels like… yet.
