A two-year-old boy was hitting his classmates, not out of anger or frustration, but seemingly, as a matter of course. If you had a block he wanted, he would hit you, then take it. It was happening multiple times a day and the obvious tactics didn't seem to be working. I asked the child's parent for advice as well as our class' parent educator. We then had a wider discussion that included the entire parent community because as a cooperative school the parents also work in the classroom as assistant teachers. This boy was our primary topic of adult conversation for several days, including an evening meeting. We settled on a unified plan of action, and then, from one day to the next, he stopped hitting the other kids.

When asked to recount her adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll's Alice famously replied, "I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then." This is true for all of us, of course. When we look back over our lives, we see that we are indeed different people than we were back then. We know that this past year, for instance, has transformed us into people we might not even have recognized last January, but this is the case every January, plague or no plague. As adults, day-to-day changes might not be so obvious, but when it comes to young children, the constant of change is apparent with every passing day: each time we see them, they are different people, and try as we might, we can never go back to yesterday. Our greatest glory as educators (friends, spouses, parents, or just generally as human beings) is is when we play the role of midwives, fully recognizing and celebrating the brand new person who stands before us, right now, not yesterday or tomorrow, a human who with each passing moment is being born anew as themselves.

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