Early Childhood Education Careers

My mom, my dad, my aunt, my uncle, and a couple of my older cousins were all teachers. As such, it was hardly a surprise to anyone when I elected to become a teacher myself. They were a little startled, however, when I got into early childhood education as a focus. Despite the great strides this field has made in recent years, early childhood teachers are sometimes not treated with the same respect that other teachers are treated with. Just because early childhood lesson plans are made for young students, however, doesn't mean that they are easy to make. Through my dedication to my career and through educating the people around me about the things that I actually do, I have been able to be a good example and demonstrate what my career is really about.

Few people really realize how fascinating early childhood education is. A lot of people assume that if mostly involves playing with toddlers all day. In reality, there is a lot more to it. Early childhood educators study a great deal of developmental theory in order to understand the learning process among kids. Middle school teachers, high school teachers, and most other educators focus on teaching academic information. With early childhood education, however, the goals are much more primary. Skills like spatial reasoning, teamwork, sociability, and basic verbal skills are highly emphasized in early childhood education. These are the things that kids are trying to learn, and as an early childhood educator you need to understand how their brains work in order to teach them.

One of the most interesting specializations within the field is early childhood special education. In some ways, it is even more difficult than the rest of early childhood education. An early childhood special educator works with some of the most difficult kids going through a very difficult age. A lot of people assume that special education classes are nothing more than babysitting, but in reality there is a lot of teaching that goes on. The goal with special needs students is to make them as independent as possible, and this is no easy task for many of them. They will one day have to go out into the real world and it is the responsibility of society to educate them on how to do this. This process begins in early childhood education and goes all the way into the teenage years or even beyond.

Teaching Astronomy For Kids

As an elementary school science teacher, I always have a lot of fun teaching kids astronomy. It is natural to want to look up at the sky with a sense of wonder and ponder the nature of the whole universe around you. This is just the desire that astronomy for kids caters to. It is a great place to use a child's natural curiosity to inspire a lifelong passion for the study of science.

One of the things that a lot of adults do not understand is that kids want to learn. It is all just a matter of making things seem accessible and important to them. That is why I usually start my astronomy for kids classes with a field trip. Rather than looking for the things they have already studied, they go in with fresh minds, ready to record details about the celestial bodies. I let them look at stars and planets through the telescope and make observations. Then, the next day in class, we use these observations as a starting point.

Of course, astronomy for children is not all just looking at neat pictures from the Hubble telescope or gazing through our own telescope (although there is a fair bit of both of these activities). Once we get back from the field trip, the class launches right into a lesson. The students make a list of questions they have. Usually, they want to know why the stars twinkle, why Mars is red, what the moon looks like up close, and things like that. Once they ask these questions, we can begin the class.

The great thing about starting my astronomy for kids class this way is that it is driven by student interest. They want to know about the moon so, when I tell them about the moon, it does not come across as just a bit of boring lecturing. The same goes for all the other subjects. They are motivated to learn, and that makes the learning happen.

At the end of the astronomy for kids class, I usually take them out to look at stars again. This time, however, we know a lot more about the heavens. When the children look out through the telescope, they can make meaningful observations about the universe around them. By comparing how they felt the first time they looked through telescopes to how they felt the second, they can see the importance of learning.

Adoption Poems

The thing about adopting a son was that, at first, it was very easy. He was very young – only two years old at the time – and although he had been through some seriously traumatic events in his life, he quickly adjusted to our family. Within only a year, everything had settled into a routine and he was as happy and healthy as a little boy can be.

It was only as he got older that things started to be difficult. He did not have repressed memories, and he wasn't a particularly troubled child, but he did start to suffer from certain identity issues. Even before he officially knew that he had been adopted, my son started writing adoption poems – short compositions about not quite feeling like he knew where he was from and who he was.

At first, I thought his adoption poetry was part of just growing up. A lot of kids are insecure, after all. Soon, however, it became a real problem. He seemed angry and unhappy, and his adoption poems had a very bitter edge to them. When my wife and I decided to tell him that he was adopted, it only confirmed what he had believed all along. It was a hard time for everyone. That is what we decided to get him some adoption poems of our own.

The first adoption poems were ones that we had composed. They were not actually about adoption, but about how much we treasured and loved him. He was going through a pretty cynical age, and he pretended to not appreciate them, but I could tell that deep down inside he was moved. Sometimes, it is hard to ask for the reinforcement and love that you need. As parents, it was our responsibility to know that he needed that love even though he was not able to ask.

When we got him a framed adoption poem, I can tell how moved he was. At first he just stared at it, but eventually he ran to us and hugged us. We have done some of the work, but then we had sent the piece in to a company that did its own custom poems and framing. They laid the whole thing out for us and printed it in a beautiful script. It turns out that framed adoption poems cost a little more than I would've expected, but it was definitely worth it. There is no price too great for having a happy child!

It is amazing how quickly temptation will grab the souls of the desperate. I am not talking about someone starving, overcome with unrequited love, or subject to some other classical plight. I am talking about myself – a graduate student at the end of my rope, with an angry adviser breathing down my neck. My problems all started with a literature review. You see, literature reviews have never been my strong suit. I am great at coming up with new ideas, and I'm also pretty good at synthesizing ideas from a few examples of diverging viewpoints. Once I'm confronted with a large body of literature on a topic, however, I rapidly lose focus. There is no other way to explain it: I freeze.

I tried looking at examples of sample literature reviews online, but they weren't helpful. The ones that people were showing for free were just not written at a professional level. Writing a review of literature in linguistics is uniquely challenging. From the outside, many people miss this, but the field of linguistics is an extremely divisive academic pursuit. Basically, people are either with Chomsky or against Chomsky. Everyone acts as if their opinion is the only valid one. If you are like me – someone willing to draw bits and pieces from both sides – everyone sees you as a traitor. It is almost impossible to synthesize the work of East Coast and West Coast linguists into a coherent whole. I tried and tried, but I failed. I tried, in fact, until I almost failed my class.

In desperation, I went beyond looking at an online literature review. I went to a custom paper writing service. I had the money saved up for an emergency, and this was definitely an emergency! I did not have high hopes. I figured that the literature review that they gave me would be somewhat ignorant of the subject matter, and the custom thesis paper would require a great deal of revision. Nevertheless, it was my only choice. It was the 11th hour so to speak, and if I didn't have the background for my thesis ready soon, all would be lost.

I was actually surprised by the quality of the paper they gave me. The APA style literature review summarized succinctly – albeit loosely – the major finding of linguistics in the last several decades. The paper was not professional, But it was written as if a solid and interested amateur had spent some time researching the subject matter. In the end, I was able to revise it into something more high-level and professional.