Topics in Early Childhood Education

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

I've Moved!

Hi, this is John and I am excited to tell you that Topics in Early Childhood Education is now hosted on Wordpress. Just click here! Please change your bookmarks so you can keep up with my latest art projects!

Monday, December 03, 2012

Here we are racing to the end of another calendar year.  The miles just keep speeding past as we navigate the race of life.  I wonder how many runners have come to mile 12 in a half-marathon and wished he had prepared better?  That was certainly my feeling the first half-marathon I ran a couple of years ago.  I'm not sure what I would have done more to prepare, but surely there was something I missed.  That last mile seemed endless and my knees and hips felt like they were becoming disembodied.
Most of us who are approaching the 'later years,' probably have a few thoughts about what we wished we would have done to prepare.  For example, I sometimes wished I had continued on to medical school and become a doctor.  Maybe I would have been able to save more money for retirement!
Early childhood educators have the opportunity to help prepare children for a future that we can just imagine at this point.  We can arm them with thinking skills that will help them in a world that will include many things that have not even been invented yet.  Building the brain connections in young people should be a top priority because it will increase their capacity for the future.  I recently told some students that I wished my early childhood teachers would have stretched my thinking capacity more so that I could understand statistics a bit better.  I said it as a joke, but I certainly hope to never hear that 'joke' from one of my former students.  It surely contains more truth than humor.