What I Learned from My Summer Job

Hello friends! The other night as I was scrolling through the \’gram, I realized I\’d barely posted in the past couples of weeks! But truthfully, I didn\’t have time. At the beginning of the week, I was working full days at one of the local child care centers, at the end of the week I was babysitting and packing, and in the midst of that I was working on a little project for someone. Needless to say, it\’s been crazy. Regardless, Wednesday was my last day of work at the child care center and now that I\’m back to Kent and slowly settling in, I wanted to share what I learned over the summer.

1. Every Child is Different Okay, well this is something that we probably already know, but after spending the summer with kids you get to see how truly different each one is. Additionally, they may do the same things sometimes, but often they have different motivations. This summer was a great opportunity for me to really work on my people skills and patience particularly since the kids haven\’t grown up yet.

2. We all need to thank our teachers more For a long time growing up, I wanted to be a teacher. I had other ideas about what I wanted to do, but I always came back to teaching. And y\’all. It is so hard. Part of it could be that I\’m not used to doing it every day, but even when I worked for a few days strait, I was going to bed at 9:30 at night. Also, particularly with younger grades, sometimes the kids just don\’t want to listen and it\’s exhausting. Moral of the summer, thank your teachers (even if you never considered yourself to be one of the kids causing problems).

3. We all need to say I love you more often Y\’all these kids were so sweet. Particularly in the younger classes, I\’d walk in and have the kids telling me they loved me and giving hugs. This world has been wild lately with hate running rampant. Luckily, most of these kids haven\’t been affected by the world\’s cruelty yet. But their attitudes of love and doing nice things for people is something that we all need to try and do more. Things in the Pre-K classroom that were once a privilege such as passing out the pencils or picking up the crayons or holding the door open, should be something that we apply to real life. Though picking up the crayons might not be something you do in an office setting lol.

Much Love,

Jacquelyn