<Begin Segment 20>

AI: Well, now when did you start getting interested in teaching yourself?

AK: You know, I was a Girl Scout leader, I was a den mother with Cub Scouts, and I was always interested in working with children. And I would get so excited, because I wasn't teaching them, they were teaching me. And all the excitement and discoveries that they would make made me feel that they were the facilitators helping me learn. And then, it was Ralph Hayes -- who's a Garfield High School teacher now, high school teacher at Franklin and later on in Bellevue, Newport Hills -- who said to me, "You know Aki, you're so interested in kids and I really think you ought to go into teaching. Why don't you consider that?" Well, I had gone back to school when my children were growing up. Well, I loved school so I was taking classes all the time anyway. And I was taking anything that interested me. And when I started having children, I thought, "I don't know anything about early childhood education. I know nothing about raising a child." And everybody gets prepared to do their job. I mean, they're going into training to work at a job. But here, one of the most important jobs of life and of a parent is working with their own child and here I didn't know anything about, anything about child development. I said, "I'd better find out something so I'll know how to at least work with kids." And the more I took those classes, the more fascinated and excited I got, because of the wealth and knowledge that these kids were bringing into the world and how they were responding to nature and things around. I thought, you know, actually, if we would respect what's happening to these kids, the interaction of the nature and the things all around us, learning could be fun and take place. Real learning could take place.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.