Before Oonga Boonga

When I was in elementary school, I never realized how much effort my teacher put into each lesson, and I never knew what the purpose of anything was. I thought even less of preschool, it seemed like a day care my parents would drop me off at even though my mom stayed home and could have looked after me. Don’t get me wrong, I loved preschool, especially this one day where we dipped toy monster trucks into paint and then rolled them over these huge pieces of paper, I just did not think that much of it. After going through two weeks of Jumpstart training though I’m starting to realize how much thought had to go behind some of those activities.

Admittedly my preschool was not Jumpstart, I do not remember there being a heavy emphasis on reading, but I do remember an emphasis on colors and shapes and learning about families and the accursed sharing. I remember thinking it was cool how the colors changed depending on what our monster trucks ran over, and I vaguely remember my teacher being the one to ask me about that. So imagine my surprise when 14 years later I am being trained to point out the same thing to a child in another preschool.

From my training it has become so obvious that there is a lot that goes into early education, and I have had experienced such disbelief at the importance of everything that goes on in Jumpstart. There is one leader at my site that is just so into early education that it almost seems to be his entire life, and that is just so amazing to see in someone. I have only seen that sort of passion in a few people about any sort of subject, and he was the first person I met to be so educated and passionate about early education. And I would say most of the people I have met at Jumpstart are like him, either they are new corps members like myself or veterans of the program, but we are all really excited to be contributing to something like Jumpstart and are exited to finally meet the kids we will be working with over the next school year.

My only regret after joining Jumpstart are that I do not remember a lot of what I did in preschool and elementary school so I will never know how those teachers helped me become a college student.

Angela Phillips

Corps Member

Team Connection/ Exploration