Choices

I never really thought too much about the choices I made, or how many choices you actually make in the course of even an hour, until last semester. My Early Childhood class had 2 guys in it and 16 girls. We were doing our final student teaching for the Early Childhood segment. UVM has 2 different preschools, the Campus Children's Center, which caters mostly to the University staff and faculty, and the Trinity Campus Center, which is more community based. One of the boys was in the Trinity Campus Center and one day while he was working and playing with the kids (we are told to get down on the children's level and talk/play with them) and a little girl sat on his lap. The girl's parent flipped out at him and said he was being inappropriate and her daughter was to never be in contact with him or any other male again. The point of bringing this up in class was to talk about how many choices you make as a teacher, and really this applies to life. I know everyone knows about the bigger choices: going to class or staying home, staying up late or going to bed early. But have you stopped to think about the little choices? What you say to a child, a simple acknowledgment to someone, letting someone cut in while driving? Really its endless. When I'm teaching I make the bigger choices like what I'm going to teach, but I also make the smaller choices like making contact with a child to help draw their attention back to the discussion, calling on certain students, sitting down and talking to students while they work, which ones I talk to, how much I help them in their writing, or even if I give a child an example. These are things I feel that we do without really thinking what the outcome might be, and without knowing what the outcome could be.