Sharing Our Present

Learning to run an interactive website is an awful lot like learning to write.

If you wish for the world to see your best work, editing must be constant.

Children Write the Future was born with a singular purpose in mind – to help some of today’s children grow into the future’s finest leaders by equipping them with the essential tools of communication which will help to render eager learners into tomorrow’s torchbearers and trailblazers.

Cindy has been a teacher for over twenty years. Like most teachers fresh from the starting gate of senior year and ready for their first classroom, she was undaunted – ready and willing to do anything and everything she could to change a system that wasn’t doing enough to evolve on its own.

Cindy saw first hand that children were capable of anything they set their minds to. It made no difference that her kindergarten class in the Houston Unified School District was sandwiched between two housing projects. Cindy made certain every child could read before they left her classroom.

After she moved to California to help set a nationwide reading recovery program into place, she got an intimate look at the deficits facing much of this country’s schools. It shattered her heart and left her with fragmented beliefs. Eventually, she traded her office for the comfort of a classroom, where she knew without doubt that she could make a difference eye to eye and child to child.

Cindy taught fourth grade for another five years, until the blend of our son’s birth and too much on our plate prompted us to open a preschool. Our children would grow like weeds in a wet summer, we knew, and we weren’t willing to miss more than a second here or there.

Yet Cindy is a teacher down to the molecules which make up her pretty little face, and it was only a matter of time before she was seeking more students to teach.

Once I started Writer Dad, her wide eyes grew even wider as she imagined the potential of teaching to a classroom without walls or ceiling, governed not by geography or proximity, but by a desire to learn.

Children Write the Future was born.

Yet teaching online is not the same as teaching in a classroom. The wild hand gestures, constant eye contact and humorous asides which garnered Cindy multiple Teacher of the Year plaques, were missing from the online environment. These were the open blooms which gave her garden its scent and she missed them dearly.

Fortunately, my bride is not only a natural teacher, she is also highly adaptable. A born teacher can teach in any medium and Cindy has been deep in study, trying to determine the best angle to approach the numerous possibilities of this new online space.

While she continues to work in the background developing the content which will render Children Write the Future into the truly remarkable space it will one day be, we’ve decided to work on a single post each week in tandem.

I’m a writer and Cindy is a teacher. We have plenty to learn together.

The beauty of an online space lies in interaction and connectivity. Without your feedback, we would not know the next best place to take the site. But because of your wonderful comments, concerns and brilliant suggestions, we now know how to take this site to the next level, and look forward to doing so.

With a full online plate and a dozen sites to run between us, we don’t want to promise anything we can’t deliver. Cindy will be working behind the scenes to design the eventual Children Write the Future course curriculum. In the meantime, we will meet here once per week to share our mutual words with you.

Our children will write the future and tomorrow starts today.

Thanks for letting us share our present with you.

Sean