Learning stuff is good

I just can't help myself, I need to give a quick motivational speech about knowledge. :-)  I think my intended audience would be any students who are reading this blog and/or our awesome teachers at the ECEC.  I am in the middle of what feels like an enormous final exam -like an "everything you have ever learned about teaching young children over your entire career" kind of final exam. We are creating a brand new Bachelors Degree in Early Childhood Education at FNU, and whether or not it makes any sense for me to be the person they brought here to do it is now beyond the point. They're stuck with me! 

We are two weeks into this process and the enormity of the challenge is still looming.  But we're doing it! We came up with a program outline my second day here.  Since then I've been mining every great resource I can find to map the curriculum so that we are creating something that would be considered an excellent program anywhere in the world. This week we are completing curriculum mapping and starting to write 16 courses, 6 of which already existed and we are just revising.  I don't know for sure how long this will take.  Hopefully we can be done with all of the course proposals (basically an outline of the content) by next week.  Then I have to do an evaluation for the dean about the existing capacity here and the needed capacity to make this happen, and start creating professional development for the faculty here to fill in where there are gaps so they can teach all of these new classes. While I prepare for that I'm embarking on a super-intensive study of Fijian cultural practices related to raising and teaching young children so that the stuff I'm offering is not coming from another planet.  Crazy huh!  But I am LOVING IT!  

So here's the thing.  Every bit of everything I have learned from my own classroom experiences with kids and my personal study in ECE is being used in this process.  I am so incredibly grateful now that I have taken the personal time for my whole career to do the extra reading, to find topics of interest and investigate them on my own, to try so hard to keep up with whatever is current in the field.  I'm so grateful that I let Michelle Buchanan talk me into getting a PhD! And trust me, there were about five years there when I pretty much never thought I'd say that. (P.S. don't tell Michelle - I'm not sure I'm ready to admit this to her.) To summarize:  It all comes back to you. Every little bit of goodness and knowledge we absorb matters!  And it doesn't just happen magically via osmosis.  We have to do hard things and then at the end we realize we know some stuff.  There's no time to waste! We need to get busy people!  Find your passion!  Do something about it!  Knowledge is power! (Dang it, I can't think of any additional cliche's)

Phew!  That's mostly it.

Here are some pics from a gorgeous kindergarten in Suva.  Kindergarten here means preschool actually.  And, even funnier, Infant here means grades 1 and 2 in school.  Man, did I have an epiphany the day I figured out what people actually meant when they were using the term "infant" in terms of teacher preparation! It still blows my mind!  But now the faculty here and I have a good laugh about it.