Even at UCLA, toddlers sometimes make the best teachers

The greatest lessons I learned at UCLA, I learned from two-year-olds. I don’t mean to belittle my fantastic UCLA education or my four years at the Daily Bruin, but it was these UCLA youngsters who supplemented my education in priceless ways.

Last summer, I happened upon a job working in Early Care and Education at UCLA’s Krieger Child Care Center. It was only supposed to be a summer job, but now, a year later, I’m still working there and I am devastated to think about leaving. The lessons I’ve learned working with up to 18 two-year-olds are all things I wish I had known since my freshman year here, and which I intend to use as I enter the real world. I’ve compiled a list of what I have found to be the most useful of the lessons we teach our toddlers and those they’ve taught me:

1. You have to let go. It’s easy to want to help a two-year-old with everything: washing hands, reaching the last rung on the climbing structure, cutting their pancakes. But it’s amazing what they will do when you let them try on their own. It makes me nervous every time my young students try to jump off the high beam without holding my hand.

But you can’t hold onto something just because it’s comfortable and makes you feel secure. You can only stretch your capacities by moving on and challenging yourself. From driving the streets of L.A. without my GPS to jetting off to Washington, D.C. for a quarter without knowing anyone there, it was the times that no one was holding my hand that I learned the most about myself and my capabilities.

2. You will fall. This is a consequence of letting go. My students get bumps and bruises from their adventures in the great outdoors and from testing the limits of their strength and coordination. My four years here have not been without deep disappointments. I’ve been rejected from jobs, from groups, from entry into over-enrolled lectures. I just wish all it took was a frozen teething ring to make me feel all better.

3. Perseverance does pay off. I have seen a child try to pour a measuring cup of milk and miss their drinking cup at every meal, every day for months. After guiding their hand a couple dozen times to show them how to pour, even I got frustrated and wondered if they would ever catch on.

Now, they do it effortlessly. When I see them fail to put together a puzzle or put the cap back on a marker literally hundreds of times before getting it right, I wonder why I can sometimes give up so easily.

4. Ask for help. We teach our young students that, instead of getting frustrated, they can always just say “help” and we can come to their assistance. With a limited vocabulary, “help” is one of the terms I hear them use most often (although not as often as “mine!”). It is an incredibly empowering word, even though it might seem like the exact opposite. It means that you know your limitations, but you also know that you have resources to overcome setbacks.

I’ve asked for help a lot in college ““ from my parents, roommates, professors and RA’s, and it has always led to much-needed reassurance and would almost always result in just the nudge I needed to get me over the hurdle and back on my way. I wish I had asked for it more often.

I am now attempting to heed my own advice as I try to “˜let go’ of my toddlers, my life as an undergrad, my strolls up Janss Steps and through the sculpture garden, and my awesome student courtside seats at UCLA basketball games. I may need a frozen teething ring after all.

Schick was an A&E writer from 2006-2010. She has also written for Prime.