This is Your Brain on Patty Cake

I had my Infant/Toddler class today, and I find my professor to be quite entertaining. She knows her stuff, which I love. There's that sense of confidence mixed with a sense of humor that has always appealed to me in teachers.

Teachers that just show up and quiz you from the book drive me mad. I can read... give me something else. Make connections. And really, with early childhood, teaching is about play and development. So, she gets it. 

But more importantly, she's not afraid to embarrass the hell out of her students to make that connection. And I love it. 

Today she was talking about infants and toddlers making connections. They do it through watching teachers and parents model behaviors. And they don't learn quickly. Those behaviors have to be repeated over and over and over again. You can't just show a child how to do a gentle touch once and expect him to remember the next day. 

We were also talking about how much is going on developmentally within an infant's brain. As she talked about the various synapses she went over explaining the structure of how messages gets sent through axons and dendrites in neurons. I found this a great review because we just finished a chapter on the brain in my psych 101 class, which is purely an online class where we spew back book crap.

So, it was entertaining to see how she took the information and molded it into something to consider as a caregiver or, as she likes to call them, educarers.

We also watched a spooky, terrible movie on how most daycare centers do a terrible job of infant care in the United States. My first inclination was, "Great make me feel guilty that I went to work when X-man was 8 months, and he went to daycare at 12 months." But then they showed the video of over crowded classrooms with overwhelmed teachers who couldn't be responsive to all of the babies' needs.

It made me happy and pissed off at the same time. It made me happy because every day after school X-man and I sit on a bench outside the infant room at his school. He likes to count the babies and watch what they're up to. He thinks it's cool when they're doing sensory activities. And never in my time with X-man are the infant rooms in the state of upheaval they were in that film. In fact, they're pretty subdued.

What pissed me off was that not every baby gets to have that kind of calm, comforting room. The head teachers in the NG baby room have been there since I toured in June 2006. They're always holding babies and talking to babies and snuggling babies. 

But I toured a couple of places where babies were just kept in their cribs for a lot of the day. As a parent, I knew I wanted more for my child, even as a sleep-deprived, postpartum depression suffering, mostly single mother. 

Now it makes me realize how, as a potential employee, I'd want to make sure I worked at a school where the environment was suitable for the children in my care. That the school put the development and health and safety of the children first. I'm going to have to be picky because I don't believe anyone deserves substandard care. But as I gain experience, I'd like to change that about the system. 

Because kids don't ask to be here when they're born. We bring them here. And in doing so we should provide them the best environment that we can, particularly when they're so little.