Remembering what I liked about what I used to know...

When I was "growing up" I never really got the hang of deciding what it was I was supposed to do for a living. I never seemed to have a definite career track. More or less, I "fell" into jobs and followed whatever it was I was interested in doing at the time. For example, the route I took to become the supervisor of the case management unit in a human service agency was very interesting and not at all what I thought I would be doing. And today I realized, as I reading a book that just arrived from Amazon, I seem to have created a career using a combination of things I've learned from all of my jobs along the way and have come full circle.

After graduating from the university, I took some early childhood education courses and found that I quite liked the idea of teaching pre-kindergarten. I love kids and 3-4 years old is the best age! One of the books we used as "additional" reading was a book called The Aesthetics of Play: A Didactic Study of Play and Culture in Preschools. I remember being very impressed by this book. The book illustrates how children play and how play and the culture they are in can be a very beneficial educational tool. Children can learn any number of subjects through play. Later, when I was teaching, I found myself using these principles again and again. For example, if we were learning about dinosaurs I would create entire themes for each lesson I wanted them to learn. We became paleontologists and had a "dig" in the sandbox. Wearing Pith helmets and carefully brushing the sand from the "dinos" we'd find we would label and catalogue them just like the real deal. All the music we would use would be about dinosaurs or I would play some classical music that was BIG, and LOUD and IMPRESSIVE so we could become the dinosaurs moving about the room. These were all ideas that came to me from reading The Aesthetics of Play. Turns out that I became so good at this that my then boss asked me to teach my colleagues how to do this as well. So, as you can see, this book was pretty influential in my life.

But here's the most interesting point about the book itself. The book was written by a woman named Gunilla Lindqvist. When I first read the book I had no idea who she was nor would I know. She was living and working in Europe and over here other less progressive psychological works and child development professionals were in vogue. It wasn't until much, much later that I would find out who she was - long after I wasn't teaching anymore. This book, this title, would come up in a conversation I had about two years ago now - a conversation with Alex. Alexander Lindqvist. My Alex... who, it turns out, is Gunilla Lindqvist's son.

Pretty cool, huh?