There is a story behind every book, and The Apprenticeship of Being Human is no exception. It is a very personal story.
Teacher
In 2002, I left a rewarding job with a talented team in the financial services to join the New York City Teaching Fellows. My wife (who was, at that time a medical student) and I were already living in a poor area of Brooklyn, NY. I sought placement in a local public school just a few minutes walk from our apartment, where I taught second and third grades.
I have lived in the bush of rural Uganda where militias frequently travel the unpaved roads, and I can honestly say that teaching 32 third-graders was harder. In my first week of teaching, I sat down with one student and asked him to read this word to me: “Hi.” He knew the letters, but couldn’t read the word. Multiply that experience by 32, add social pathologies, and you have a very good sense of my experience (with a full nine weeks of graduate school under my belt). As I tried to learn to teach in this context, I began asking questions: What had happened early in life that a third grader couldn’t decode a two letter word? When did the deficits emerge? What factors contribute to educational success or failure?
Father
In the midst of my teaching tenure, I became a father. My first daughter, Elisabeth, was born in the same neighborhood where my students lived, but experienced the world in dramatically different ways. This prompted a new line of questions: What role does the family play in learning? How could parents in poor neighborhoods promote learning?
When Elisabeth was 18 months old, I took a child care leave from the Department of Education to be a full-time father while my wife did a three-year residency in pediatrics. That transition brought a host of new questions. What is normal for an 18 month old? What will she enjoy? How do I know if and when I should be concerned about her development?
Entrepreneur
My experience of full-time parenting forced me to seek solutions. Where could I find timely, reliable child development information? I found lots of information, but it took a lot of time and effort to locate it – to say nothing for putting it into practice. I saw a tremendous business opportunity to provide simple, reliable, customized developmental information to parents of young children through the web. I didn’t have the skills to make it a reality, but my childhood best friend Jonathan Dahl did. So, together we launched Tumblon in November 2008, the only online service to allow parents of young children to interact with their children’s developmental milestones. (This 2 minute tour shows how it works.)
Writer
I began writing a featured blog on Tumblon called Essential Questions that explores the central issues of child development, education and civil society. (If any of the questions I’ve mentioned above piqued you interest, you can find my pursuit of answers in Essential Questions.) In the process, I found that there was another compelling need: to provide a generative metaphor that helps parents, educators, health professionals, activists, and policymakers to understand and simply communicate why early childhood parenting is so critical to health, education and civil society. The apprenticeship of being human is that metaphor.