How it all started

It is easy for me to forget that I once propelled the learning of 20 students as a classroom teacher.  A SAHM of three, I am often befuddled by my precious, precocious, peculiar tribe, and can hardly recall my pedagogical accomplishments of yesteryear.  Yet now that two of my three children are in school and the third ready for preK soon, I find myself reflecting on the teacher I once was and the parent I am now.  And I look at this blog as a means of proceeding forward in my own pedagogy as parent/educator.
When my husband and I decided to have children, I really believed three things. . . "If we are good parents, our kids will be good kids."-and I had no doubt that we would be, "If we read to our children and talk to them and teach them new things, they will love school and do well." it's the children who sit in front of the TV all day who have problems, and "We will not be those parents that people stare at in restaurants, grocery stores, and waiting rooms." after all our kids would be well behaved and delightful as per the first two statements.  As a twenty something (or just turned 30ish? whatever*wink*) with several years teaching experience and a Masters Degree in Education, I actually thought I knew something about parenting, so as each of those statements revealed itself as blatantly *false* I had some serious rethinking to do. 

In retrospect, I realize that those assumptions I made about parenting began while I was a teacher and influenced my understanding of the children and parents that were in my charge.  I thought of myself as a teacher educated in how to meet the needs of diverse learners, particularly through integrating the arts via an understanding of Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences.  As a parent of diverse learners I see how narrow my view of "diverse" really was back then, I truly believed in my mentor teacher's mantra "everybody is different" yet still, my concept of "different" was just in the early stages of development alongside my view of a "good parent".   So, Knowing that the nature of life is cyclic, it makes sense that 2 out of three of my theories on raising children circled around to bite me in the butt once my first born reached school age.( "We will not be the parents people stared at at restaurants, grocery stores and waiting rooms" had been crossed off in the early days when we realized every parent is scrutinized for every action or non action made in public.)
So this is where this blog begins, the big bang, when school teacher meets mother meets school,  and child meets teacher, meets learner in a big messy SPLAT!
_A