JASON'S ONLINE CLASSROOM LLC
BELLEAIR BEACH, FLORIDA

My teammate, Linda Barrington who was housed in the modern Kindergarten room across the way was delightful and helpful. The aide, Gail Freeman who was assigned to me was terrific with the children and with me. I was in Kindergarten heaven! I had found an age that was innocent and enthusiastic about everything! They were delightful. Their learning styles were intriguing and certainly combined the visual, auditory and kinesthetic areas. I wasn’t teaching Kindergarten in 1990 when The Letter People had their appearance revised by the new company that had purchased the rights to them. Junk food was no longer part of the letter people nor were any negative images such as Mister X being All Wrong. At McDonald Elementary waist high shelving units formed the classroom space/boundaries. Carpet and acoustical ceiling tiles helped with softening sound from room to room. We had central air conditioning also! Yeah, I’m still traumatized from my first assignment with a big fan and lots of hot Florida air and dust coming through the open windows! Hurray for the bond issue that air conditioned the district’s schools. The openness did encourage teaming and the coordination of quiet work with more active work assignments. In the center of both the primary and intermediate areas was a walled off rectangular area making up the teachers’ office areas and work space. A lot of coordination and planning took place in that common area. During the McDonald years we did welcome a new son, Jared into our family. After maternity and childcare leave, I worked six weeks as the morning part-time Kindergarten teacher. When our house and business sold within a short time of each other, we moved across the bay to a new county and I resigned my position. I spent the next 8 years as a stay-at-home mom looking at education from the other side of the fence. We always said that we would like to retire to the beach and then began to wonder why we were waiting. We put a deposit on a beach condo in its preconstruction phase before we were married. After we married, we bought a house five minutes from my husband’s business and fairly close to my school. We went about our lives while the condo building was going up which would be about a two year process. During that wait time, our son, Jared was born in 1980. After about six weeks, several situations occurred at the same time. I found myself without a reliable baby sitter since I wanted home-care for him and both the house and my husband’s business sold within weeks of each other. During the stay at home years, I practiced my early childhood skills on the boys trying to provide the toys, play experiences, and mini-fieldtrips that would encourage their development. I wrote lesson plans in my head. How weird is that? There were also piles of books and reading every day. I never appreciated the quiet attention and stillness of children who are into a good story until I had my own for 24/7. I could read forever, I couldn’t keep up with them indefinitely! As my older son, Jared, started school, I was available to drive and chaperone field trips, volunteer at school, type for the school’s newspaper and help with fund raising events. Looking at the classroom from the parent’s point of view is interesting. Wanting your child to have a good experience puts you a bit at the mercy of the teacher. How to balance helping out without being a pain – certainly didn’t want any internal eye rolling going on. I also began to see how much influence and power each teacher holds. Things one might say and not think about twice would be the very thing that the child took to heart, repeated or followed faithfully. A teacher in Florida must take courses or their equivalent of in-service class hours while working in order to renew the teaching certificate from the state every five years. I didn’t want mine to expire since I intended to eventually return to work. During those stay at home years I took courses in Educational Leadership for renewal purposes. I almost made it to a double master’s before the baby sitting problem raised its head again – this time with two children involved. I had a Masters in Early Childhood and I was two courses away from one in Educational Leadership. I never made the other Master’s degree, but I did obtain certification in Administration and Supervision from the state. That background helped later on in roles such as team leader and in the supervision of interns. The grant also provided a resource teacher who worked with several sites that kept us both true to the grant and learning about and implementing the High/Scope program. After about 8 months on the job, the private school’s owner asked me to allow a teacher from another of her sites to shadow me for several days in order to learn about the program. Silly me! I naively thought that she was going to expand and open another PreK E. I. No, I was actually training my replacement. At the exit interview, I was told that I was just too expensive and she couldn’t afford to keep me. The other teacher would work for less. That was a lesson in business and the profit line. It was also a lesson in a system without an appeal process or even due process. No process here – just “Your last day will be ___.” We were an established PreK early intervention class with a few years of experience under our belts when the University of South Florida, Bayboro Campus, began to use us to provide several of their interns with an early childhood field experience in 1997. As one of the cooperating teachers, it was an enriching experience working with these young teachers in training. They were talented individuals while in college and have been an asset to their districts in the years since their graduation. The new team and curriculum provided a fresh incentive to explore other ideas and teaching techniques. Second grade was still early childhood, but that age level required a different focus and academic planning. Those changes kept me growing professionally. I also served as team leader for second grade and the instructional partner for the English as a Second Language (ESOL) classes.