The Preschool and Me

I'm an only child. I didn't so much mind it - I don't remember actively pining for a sibling, except when I really wanted to learn how to double-dutch and there was no one around. I grew upon a block full of kids, and I had an active social life.

I spent a lot of time babysitting, even as a very young child - this would involve me watching the children of family friends in one room while adults where in another. By the time I was in high school, I had regular, weekly babysitting gigs.

My first real, paycheck job was as a hasher (food server) at a dorm at Stanford over the summer, when I was fourteen. I was lucky enough to have three of my friends begin working there as well. It was not great, but I made money. That fall, as a sophomore, I began supervising/tutoring a sixth grader who lived down the street after school. The following summer I became a preschool teacher's assistant. I continued working at the preschool until my senior year, when they stopped offering an afternoon program. I was offered a position as an after-school nanny to a family with two preschool aged children, and I continued that through the summer, along with the summer after my freshman year in college.

At college, I initially began courses that would allow me to become a computer science major. But I didn't quite get programming, and I didn't love it, and I especially didn't love having to take statistics again and doing quite badly in it. I made a radical change to a major in creative writing, and somewhere along the way began taking child development classes. I got it into my head that I would graduate a semester early, and when my mom asked what I would do with myself when I graduated, I answered that I would work at preschools until my writing career got off the ground.

So when I got out of school, I started at first with a substitute program, but that was pretty awful. Then I began at a school on Robertson in Los Angeles, and that was awful. I became a nanny and started taking night classes at the local community college so I could have enough Early Childhood Education credits to become a real teacher, not just an assistant. By the following fall, I had 13 credits, and I quit my nanny job, and went to Europe for six weeks with my then boyfriend.

I was unemployed for about three months before a preschool hired me. It was a Reggio Emilo type school - a philosophy I had never heard of, but lined up incredibly well with my own.

Tomorrow - Part II