An Intellectually Creative Affair: Teacher Tom's Play Summit
My journey as an early childhood educator began in 1996, the year our daughter was born. In the back of my mind, I'm sure I was aware that my wife and I were going to be her primary "teachers," at least for the time being, but I recall secretly telling myself that this aspect of parenthood could wait. My instinct was to simply love her, care for her, respond to her, and, well, make every moment as perfect as I could. Any "teaching" that I was going to do would come later, I told myself, sort of thinking that I could hold it off at least until we could carry on a conversation.
That was more or less my concept of education back then: adults telling and doing things to children. The Baby Einstein company (now owned by Disney) was founded in 1996, but it wasn't alone in promoting theories about things one could do to boost your newborn's learning potential, like hanging certain types of mobiles over her crib, buying special toys, and the playing of classical music. Well-meaning people gave us these things as gifts, but they went into closets to wait until I thought we were ready for teaching. They felt like distractions or intrusions into our little three-person triangle of love.
It wasn't until our daughter was two-years-old that I was first exposed to preschool. I'm forever grateful to the random mother I met on a local playground who told me about cooperative preschool. We were loath to send our little girl off CONTINUE READIG: Teacher Tom: An Intellectually Creative Affair: Teacher Tom's Play Summit