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A Day on the Job

Dianna Burpee, child-care provider, Gingerbread School, St. Petersburg.

How long have you worked at Gingerbread?

I've been with them for 14 years. Actually 14 years and five months.

I was actually in between jobs at the point in time when I took this position. When I first started I thought, "Okay, I'm just going to do it for the summer." I was going to school at the time. . . . I started here and I actually fell in love with it. My boss and I joke that this is the longest summer job I've ever had. I just never left.

I have the older 3s, very young 4s. I have 18 on the roll and we're permitted 15 (in the classroom at one time). Some children come part time, some come full time.

They're focusing a lot on their small motor skills, like a lot of cutting. Cutting is a great exercise for hand muscles, for when they start to write. We do the days, the months, numbers, colors. We have a couple of Spanish-language body parts songs that we focus on. A lot of self-help skills.

There's just so much that I can learn from them and that they can learn from me. It's like magic, all of a sudden their eyes widen. It's phenomenal to watch them experience new things in their life, watching them become the little people that they are going to be one day. Where else can you go to work that you're going to get hugged and kissed all day? It's like an abundance of love, it's great.

Basically just maintaining a steady sense of security in the room. Just like us, they have their different days, their ups and downs. I believe in a lot of fairness. Believe it or not, at this age they have cliques. So the standard in my classroom is we're all friends and we all play together. It's kind of sad, but they do have cliques at 3 years old or 4 years old.

We have to have 12 hours of in-service training every year. It's actually a state requirement. We do a lot of seminars (through various state agencies and organizations), and we do a huge teaching conference in Orlando every year, just on different things that are coming new for the children.

I'm not supposed to say. (At Burpee's level, pay is about $9-$12 an hour).

I think they're all really good. I just love to come to work. I think most people just don't enjoy what they do. I thoroughly enjoy my job. I walk in with the attitude that everything is brand new. Nothing is going to carry over from the day before. And just basically seeing their smiles makes my day.

I think my worst day would be walking into a classroom full of everyone of them being sick. The worst thing would probably be if I was in a bad mood. It's hard to come to work in a bad mood when you know you're going to get hugged and kissed and smiled at all day. I really can't have a bad day to tell you the truth.

No. I guess my idea of unwinding is spending time with my dog and my boyfriend.

My hours are from 7 to 3, I work a straight 8-hour shift with my children.

Probably still in the child-care field. I don't know if I would change from the preschool environment and go into something like through the state, like being an inspector. That's hard to say because I really, really like my job. Maybe moving up to a director position. But definitely in the child-care field.