I did not set out to be a teacher at all, and more than that, even as a child, I planned to never, ever spend time with young children. And yet it happens that, having been vigorously kneaded, folded, and stretched by life’s vagaries, I AM a teacher and I spend so much time with and thinking about young children.

Teacher is an inaccurate (or over-sufficient) term, I think, for what I do. I am an engaged observer, a student of my students and of the masterful teachers whom I encounter in person or in print. I call my students ‘my children’ and their parents I call ‘my parents.’ This work has given me a large, diffuse, transitory, and sometimes discordant family. And, like a family, this work has provided me with a reasonably intelligible, defining space from which I can interact with and represent my ideas about the world. Everything that I am: mother, child, sister, breather, mover, writer, singer, maker of images, thinker, feeler, perceiver, intuiter, can fit – at least a little, almost enough – within my role as teacher. What doesn’t fit may find a place here.