Words of Inspiration & Motivation

This is a quote from Marcy Whitebook that has resonated with me this week.  I believe it is so important to break the silence on important topics such as early childhood education.  If our voices are not loud enough to be heard, we cannot expect change to happen on its own.

“There is ‘No Single Ingredient’ that will enable us to achieve effective teaching.  It’s not education or mentoring, it’s both.  And it’s compensation too.  So what am I doing to combat the attack on higher education for teachers of young children?  What’s feeding me and what am I doing that I hope will catalyze change in the field?  I am trying to break the silence about the attack on education…challenging it in my writing and speaking and encouraging others to do so as well.”
–Marcy Whitebook

This next quote is from the second contributor I chose Ann Turnbull.  This quote resonates with me so much because to this day people do not understand what it is like to raise an intellectually disabled child.  She speaks about her and her husband knowing that his son was their hardest earned degree.  He passed away at the age of 41, JT had an intellectual disorder, mixed with slight autism and bipolar disease.  Making sure he had the best quality of life was their number one priority.

 

"Rud and I have six degrees between us, but we frequently say that ‘‘JT is our best professor.’’ Over the years, he has continued to teach us lessons—sometimes more than we wanted to learn. We often comment that what makes him such a challenging professor is that ‘‘he so often gives us the final exam before we’ve had the course.’’ This means that when we fail the final exam, he takes us back through ‘‘remedial learning’’ until we master the lessons required to calibrate his supports and services in order to ensure his individual quality of life and our family’s quality of life."

--Ann Turnbull 

Other quotes:

 

"I had just a built-in passion that it was important to make a real contribution in the world, to fix all the injustices that exsisted in the world, and I wanted to do that through teaching." 

- Louise Derman-Sparks

“To me making a difference will be helping one child be able to be successful in the classroom; one little sparkle will make the difference for me throughout the whole day”.

-Raymond Hernandez Ms Ed.

 

“What a unique opportunity we have in working with children, we as professionals in the early childhood field have the opportunity to shape a child’s life for the better. “

-Sandy Escobido

 

The above quote relate to the passion and motivation that I feel for early childhood education.  It is so important to think about the children first and to always remember if we  affect one child's life, we are accomplishing our goals one-by-one.