I have learned this year through my children, parents, and teachers. I have learned by observing, listening, and experiencing. Reading books and articles has been invaluable in laying groundwork for my thinking, filling in gaps, as well as generating new questions for me to explore. Writing and reflecting has forced me to begin to sort out what I have learned.

I know that a lot of what is written here may seem like common sense or even painfully obvious. But I have had to experience it all on my own to truly understand and appreciate what I have learned.

My favorite literary protagonist poetically describes the need to reflect on her own individual experiences as a source for growth. In Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie tells her friend Pheoby:

Course talkin' don't amount tuh uh hill uh beans when yuh can't do nothin' else...Phoeby, you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo papa and yo mama and nobody else can't tell yuh and show yuh. Two things everybody's got to do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves (1937, p.183).