Teachers and Teaching

What really fuels the success or failure of an early childhood teacher or provider? The answer is one word: understanding. How you do acquire it? Maybe through experience, maybe you can't acquire it.

Understanding very young children can't be taught. It's a natural thing. It's the talent or ability to realize and relate to the human state of non-reason. It's a little like the ability to put a million piece puzzle together with no prototype.

People who can work effectively with very young children don't fit into any one mold, life-style, or type. They probably won't have a degree in Early Childhood Education. But you probably can say is they are independent and strong willed. They have to be to work with very young children. Pushovers just don't make it.

An experienced provider has the innate ability to understand and interpret more than what is heard and seen by other people. They also literally see and hear more than other people. It's another whole plane of awareness and often substitutes for running to someone else, a book or a theory, or a preconceived notion.

Knowledge of theories will always separate the educated from the under educated. But a knowledge of theories doesn't mean someone has a talent to care for very young children. Knowledge and talent aren't the same thing. Knowledge expands talent, it doesn't create it. And no amount of knowledge can produce talent. It's never surprising that an under educated grandmother has more child care aware than her daughter with the doctorate.

How does the talent evolve? Motherhood. It's the natural order which actually puts about 750,000 of those puzzle pieces together in a whipstitch. That's not to say non-mothers or very young women can't do the work and well.

Very young women do very nicely working with older, established providers. This is how many young women learn. It's how they get the experience needed to really make a success of a childcare career.

Experience, or years of working with very young children adds a lot of puzzle pieces. The natural child care years usually weed out the no-talents anyway. The experience of having children with all the intensity and work involved usually dashes any romantic notions about working with small children as a career.

Yet today, the older woman with her understanding and her talent as a package is being over looked. She and her old hat are passe, even though her old hat might be a golden magician's hat filled to the brim with the kind of talent and magic kids really relate to and trust.

Trends are moving toward hiring degrees with young women with no experience in
tow. Putting young women with young children is an idea administrators really like. The young with the young seems fresh, clean and new. A sparkling example of a fresh start. But does fresh translate into understanding?

Peer teachers with young parents seems to make sense. It's an avenue of mutual identities working together to discover all the properties of childhood together. But who's answering the questions? When the teacher knows less about child care than the parent, does it boil down to the guessing leading the guessing? Where is grandma's old hat when you need it?

Whether your child's teacher is older, middle aged, or just past her teens, parents who are looking for child care or examining the one they are using should ask themselves if the teacher in charge has the experience to really understand the needs of children. Does her experience show or is she spending your child's infancy, toddler years and preschool years guessing?